

Flipboard: A social magazine for your iPad - ssclafani
http://www.flipboard.com/

======
davepeck
"The stuff you care about, all in one place."

Except the stuff I care about will never be in just one place. Somehow "more
stuff you care about, all in yet another place" doesn't have the same ring to
it.

To be clear: I don't mean to knock Flipboard. I'm very impressed with their
high quality work, and I'm sure it can be a fun and useful tool. I'm just
interested in the broader notion of "all in one place."

My hypothesis is that there will never be "one true venue" for finding news.
We're foragers by nature. Our valuation of a piece of content is (in part)
proportional to how hard that content was to find. We will always seek new
venues for content discovery.

~~~
credo
You make very good points.

However, I suspect that the app will do very well without users like you and
me.

I haven't yet tried out the app, but it does seem like they are meeting the
needs of a large market (and seem to have impressed a lot of "tech
journalists")

~~~
axod
large market? or vocal market?

Tech journalists like to make out that everyone is sitting in their home
tweeting. It's just not the reality though.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Let's be brutally honest: I do not want to read the work of "everyone". Just
the ones who can write well in a language I can read. [1]

In this century, when everyone with at least a smidgen of desire can publish
to a worldwide audience, and when anyone who _doesn't_ want a worldwide
audience has to carefully hide their paper diary lest someone scan it, the
assumption that most good contemporary writers can be found on the web is not
half bad, and it gets better every day.

\---

[1] there is, of course, always room for a larger variety of people to take up
the art of writing well in English.

------
pclark
This will get users because it looks gorgeous. I doubt they will keep coming
back.

This is all essentially duplicate content. I see _these_ links already in
twitter and facebook. All this does is display them prettily. And people
_hate_ seeing stuff that is "new" that they've already seen. Better to show no
content.

All the feedback set out in the Apollo News thread applies here:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1520941>

IMHO. Brilliant execution on a flawed concept.

~~~
mechanical_fish
I'm not as convinced. You can use this thing as a Twitter client, can you not?
I've been expecting Twitter clients to evolve into this; this is a nice stab
at it.

I miss the linearity. Twitter is linear; it has a timeline. This would seem to
be a nonessential feature, perhaps even a limitation, and yet I miss it when I
do not see it. I feel disoriented. Though maybe if I use this Flipbook app for
a while I will find it is still there, just slightly obscured.

I might prefer to read some twitter feeds as tweets, and others through an app
like this. Time for multiple Twitter accounts, perhaps.

A very interesting experiment.

------
jrnkntl
"Flipboard is currently over capacity, please try and add your Twitter account
later"

Ehm, wtf? Why does it even need a Flipboard server? What happens to my twitter
account info? All they need is a XAuth token, right?

~~~
milestinsley
It would appear they are doing some server side magic to determine which stuff
shows up (hence the need for their own server):

"...Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged
items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also
has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook
status messages and it lays those photos out."

Quoted from: [http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-
rev...](http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-
revolutionary-social-news-ipad-app-flipboard/)

~~~
jrnkntl
That makes sense, but I'd like to see some more transparent feedback with
regards to my privacy then.

Something like: "We need to send your Twitter/Facebook stream to our servers
to work our magic and present you only the signal instead of the noise"

~~~
mchapman87501
Finally tripped across their privacy policy and terms of use:
<http://www.flipboard.com/privacy> <http://www.flipboard.com/terms>

They may use personally identifiable information to send "marketing or
promotional materials," so perhaps that's how they plan to make money.

------
macrael
Hurray for Adam Lisagor. His videos are great. He also did work for square, I
wonder if this is going to become a trend.

~~~
tlrobinson
And <http://birdhouseapp.com/>

These tech product demos by him are getting played out pretty fast.

~~~
charliepark
Adam's videos have a rare combination of __sincerity __, __great writing __,
and __excellent production values __. I don't know what he charges to make
these, but I'd love to hire him to promote our app. His work is great.

------
necubi
It's a neat concept, but it seems they still have some issues to work out. I'm
getting a login error when trying to log in to facebook, and none of the other
channels are loading any content.

Edit: Facebook's still not working, but the other channels are. One thing's
for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad.

~~~
extension
_One thing's for sure: it's the best way to browse HN on an iPad_

Really? There are no comments, you can't login, and you have to bounce to
Safari to actually read anything. It doesn't even look that slick. What's the
point?

~~~
ynniv
_There are no comments_

Sold!

Well, obviously not since I'm participating in them, but wow are comments
over-rated.

~~~
wmeredith
What? The comments are why I read Hackernews.

------
jaytee_clone
I'm curious how are they are going to solve the problem that most people hate
to learn new interfaces of their old tools.

For example, it took me a while to start using google reader, google calendar.
I told all my friends how great those tools are, but none of them has
converted.

People are used to their twitter, facebook, newspaper interfaces. Crossing the
chasm from early power users to mainstream users will be hard.

~~~
benatkin
To me, viewing linked images and articles from twitter is a whole different
app. So it's less about convincing them to upgrade and more about convincing
them that they need the new app IMO.

------
faramarz
This promo video feels a lot like what Square had. In fact the main guy looks
like the same guy in Square's video demo. I wonder if there is a Square (read
Jack Dorsey) connection with this product.

Looks great. I don't have an iPad to use it, but the interaction in the video
looks promising.

[Edit] I Just read that Jack Dorsey is one of Investors. perhaps that explains
the video demo similarities. same resources?

~~~
macrael
The man who is in the video (and who _made_ the video (videos, actually)) is
Adam Lisagor a.k.a. @lonelysandwich. He is part of You Look Nice Today and
does the videos for Put This On.

~~~
faramarz
Thanks mate. He really does a great job playing the customer while promoting
the product.

------
kmfrk
That flip animation is _really_ annoying. It doesn't make any sense either;
you fold your active page mid-page to progress? Wouldn't that just fold half
of the page and reveal another half of the underlying page, were it real? It
uses the metaphor of a book with two pages - one on both sides - for a single-
page layout.

I don't get it, but maybe testing showed that people liked it?

~~~
fredoliveira
I'm quite sure there was no real testing here (heck, there isn't in most other
apps anyway). I quickly showed this to the guys in the office and everyone
found the animation to be weird and confusing. Some tried to flip the other
side of the screen to see if it would reveal anything else.

I guess they were trying to justify their name and logo.

~~~
kmfrk
>I guess they were trying to justify their name and logo.

It seems like a chicken-and-the-egg conundrum. :)

I just can't figure out why they would want it in the first place. I assume
they did beta testing.

------
dot
I'm impressed with the video and can't wait to try it. I love startups that
improve the way we interact with all the content bombarded at us.

------
Timothee
Interview and more "real-life" demo with Robert Scoble:

[http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-
rev...](http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-
revolutionary-social-news-ipad-app-flipboard/)

I really like that kind of re-presentation of content. The "Times" app does
something similar on Mac for feeds.

At least visually, I find it very appealing. I don't know if it's because of
the variety of layout, or if somehow decades of newspapers and magazines have
taught us to like content displayed in a certain way, but I feel that I'd be
more interested in reading articles like this.

However, in the case of Times, (which admittedly doesn't look nearly as sexy
as this) I ended up not using so much and going back to Google Reader…

------
stevederico
This is a marvelous app. I really appreciate your attention to detail and
simplicity throughout the UI. The application feels very natural and provides
a lot of information while not being bombarding. I plan to use this as my
primary HN reader however, I did not see an upvote mechanic available.
Overall, I really like the product and hope to see it succeed. I would, and I
am sure other will, pay around $1.99 for an app like this.

Addition features: offline mode Google reader integration with like and share
buttons Post article to blog

Regards,

Steve

------
headsclouds
I don't know about this application, but I haven't yet seen one achieve the
goal they all share, and that's making the result of aggregating all those
sources not seem like cacophonous noise. It seems to me that the moment you
stuff all your feeds in there and connect all those accounts the content just
kind of stops to matter, there's too much of it and I lose interest in reading
any of it.

Content needs exclusivity, at least in my opinion. That’s why I still use
feeds for notification of new content and I always consume it on the original
site.

------
aik
I don't have an iPad but I'm seriously impressed by that website and the video
production quality. Well done. I wish I could try it out.

------
ddewey
It seems like an obvious idea in retrospect, and it fits with the iPad
concept-- not a necessity, but a much more satisfying way of doing some
specific tasks.

I wonder what its integration with the browser is like? I'm not sure if it'd
be better to have a separate app for my Google Reader and Hacker News, but
those are both sources I'd like to read in this format.

------
smackfu
Bizarre that they are cutting off the articles in mid-sentence and then
kicking you out to Safari. In many cases, they are not even long articles.
There just isn't any scrolling functionality at all.

------
mkramlich
I'm not impressed by the functionality of the app (though of course lots of
others may like it) but I am impressed by the slickness of their video
production. Very Apple-y.

------
donohoe

      {"success":false,"errormessage":"flipboard is over capacity"}

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danmelnick
I wonder if they actually licensed that music for use in that video? If my ear
is correct it's The Bad Plus. I hope they did license it.

------
axod
I have absolutely no idea why anyone would want this. I can already do all of
those things...

------
malloreon
Can you only add 7 feeds (+facebook +twitter) to the contents page? I want to
add like 30.

------
ejwcom
Does not use xAuth for Twitter account addition, which seems strange.

~~~
edog1203
Actually, it does use xAuth for Twitter.

