Press is starting to leak today about a new product for the iPad called Flipboard. It calls itself a "social magazine" and what it does is pull all the content being viewed by people in your social networks and presents it to you in a magazine format. I have to say it's pretty amazing. If you use sites like Twitter and Facebook to find stories that have been promoted by your friends, then this app is for you. People are already giving praise to this product. But as i read about it i think this gives people what they have been looking for on the internet for a while, a truly culturally relevant content magazine online. Think about this scenario: You follow certain people on Twitter because they link to the content that you enjoy and are looking for on the Internet. Well now imagine that same list creating a magazine style experience. I can think of several instances where this product may have a huge impact:
- As minorities search for relevant content on the web and look to their social circles to find the content that media outlets are not giving them. Now they can have the magazine they have been looking for
- Minority media outlets that have not truly gone digital yet should see this as yet another reason why they need to and that it's long overdue.
- In education circles this offers a new way to share background information about a topic in a digestible format.
- We may even see new crop of "social content aggregation editors emerge that are looked to by users to organize content in their social feeds for their enjoyment on Flipboard
But the launch of Flipboard really shows how we are moving to world where we validate our information sources more for social connections than from institutional ones. We have looked to Facebook and Twitter to be our newsdesk for some time now and now a product has come to take that activity and put in back in the magazine format we have enjoyed for years. It will be interesting to see where this goes in the long term and very interesting to see what flipboards our activity feeds create.
Watch the video below and You can listen to my cinch cast about it as well. You can also follow me on Twitter @navarrowwright