Have an iPad? You have to start using Flipboard

Do you have an iPad?  Do you use Twitter and/or Facebook?  If you answered yes to these questions you have to download the new Flipboard application.  This is the Twitter and Facebook application that you have always wanted,you just did not know it until now.

Flipboard bills themselves as the world’s first social magazine.  While not perfect, I love the first version of this app more than any other iPad app I amusing (except for Evernote which is in its own class).

Flipboard enables you to view, in a magazine-style format, your Twitter and Facebook feeds.  Here is why this is different, worth paying attention to:

• You can put Twitter lists, search terms, or individuals into their own sections and view these streams.  While Tweetdeck, and others, achieve the same results via columns the Flipboard experience is better.
• As you dive into the sections you have defined you see a mix of individual tweets and, the real win, you see the articles that people were tweeting.  You no longer need to click upon random URLs to decide if you want to view the content.  Instead, the graphics and text of the original article are right there in front of you.    Not happy with seeing the page rendered in Flipboard, just click “Read on Web” and you are off into the browser to view it directly on the original site.
• You can see who else has retweeted the article and choose to follow, if desired, as well as reply, RT, or share the article via e-mail.

Visually, this is a better experience than Pulse and others that have also taken unique approaches. While others raised the bar, Flipboard has gone i a direction that is intuitively better, “more right”.

Flipboard does need a few more features, however, before I could really live within this platform.  Here is a short-wish list:

• Allow an unlimited number of sections.  Right now I cannot find a way to go beyond 9 sections.
• Let me load in e-mail as a section.
• Let me pull in other channels like RSS feeds, YouTube, Flickr, and other platforms.
• You can also include your Facebook updates but the inability to further refine and filter results leaves me wanting more.

That’s it for now.  A really nice version 1.0 product, looking forward to seeing what comes next.

John