[Updated 16 August, 2010: Newsweek covers the Flipboard launch, saying, "it's actually pretty profound. Now anyone who is gathering up Twitter feeds is, in effect, curating a magazine. It means that we're stumbling toward a completely customized form of journalism."]
[Updated 25 August, 2010: Loyola Marymount University releases an iPad "version" of its magazine. LMU press release.]
Brent Grinna wrote about the new iPad application Flipboard the other day. [Update: Cem Sertoglu wrote a good post as well, with a worthwhile 26-minute video interview of Flipboard founder Mike McCue.] Brent described it as "pioneering a new category of social magazine." He also referred to my Alumni Futures article from June, 2010, in which I said that alumni magazines would have to deploy "the interactive, dynamic and fast-changing form that more well-funded publications are already pushing to readers on new platforms and new devices."Fast forward to this week, when I fired up my iPad, and for the first time used the free Flipboard app to log into Facebook and Twitter. I started flipping through compact, simply formatted (but attractive) pages of my friends' and followers' social stream, and within 60 seconds I happily realized that my June blog post is already obsolete.
In June I had written that for now...
"to go portable, alumni magazine publishers must choose between
Some apps are certainly popular, but for this use they may not be effective. Before an alumnus sees content via your app, he must visit the online app store, download the app, and launch it to read your content. These are far from insurmountable barriers, but they are barriers to participation nonetheless."
- a standalone program (an "app") and
- a mobile-optimized web site (although some may choose both).
With Flipboard, or its likely successors, these barriers are mostly surmounted. Yes, it's a standalone app that users must download, install and configure. But unlike an alumni magazine, it does more than one thing. In fact, unlike any traditional magazine, it does many things, almost all of which are things that readers want to do anyway (i.e., participate in open social networks online). So because it feeds them information from their online social networks as well as from mainstream and independent media outlets, people are going to download it and use it.
And there's more: You don't need to wait until your alumni publication decides to publish to Flipboard. If your alumni organization, alma mater or alumni publication have Twitter feeds, they're already publishing to Flipboard (even if they don't know it). Flipboard's official list of content providers includes mainstream magazines and newspapers such as Bon Appétit, The Economist, Fortune, and The New York Times. But anything that shows up in your Twitter stream will appear in Flipboard.
The photo accompanying this article shows a recent page from my Twitter stream as seen via Flipboard on the iPad. Four of the five articles are from my alumni association (because they sent out four tweets in quick succession, not a great practice in my opinion). Flipboard takes links to web pages sent via Twitter or Facebook, and excerpts the contents of those web pages in a page-layout format, as seen here. Articles, images and embedded links are clickable for viewing full size in Flipboard or on the web.[Click on the image to view full size.]
With longer articles, you can read excepts within Flipboard, and you can click through from Flipboard items to full-length articles or photo essays in the iPad's web browser. This isn't about the iPad, by the way - the same format could work as a web page on a laptop or desktop machine, and certainly will work on tablets other than the iPad. The point is: no more squinting at nano-scale fonts, or jabbing your finger repeatedly at a minuscule hyperlink on your cell phone's display.
Five quick takeaways:
- Organizations and publications are moving briskly toward the transformation I hinted at in June, via their audience's social streams. However, most readers won't see that content in the variable, appealing Flipboard format – they'll see it in the unappealing format of Facebook's web layout or Twitter's third-party readers (like TweetDeck, HootSuite, and Twitterrific). Very few people – yet – are using iPads, and many of them don't have Flipboard. But the app just appeared in the last two weeks – if it appeals to readers, it will take off rapidly. And anyway, Flipboard formatting could easily be built into a web interface for your laptop or desktop computer.
- Flipboard users' behavior will provide a real-time answer to the question, "What content do readers value?" This is also partly a reflection of the utility generated by the networks that the information comes from. In social network settings, we mostly want information from, and about, our friends and family. As danah boyd said to her audience at the CASE Summit in New York recently, "People aren't addicted to technology. People are addicted to other people."
- This isn't about Flipboard. It's about the behavior that Flipboard enables. Some other product or service will do the same thing better, more easily or with more appeal and Flipboard will go away. If you're thinking about what this means for your institution, nevermind the iPad and the app store: focus on the idea of readers interacting with updates from their connections online.
- Twitter and Facebook manifest, to some extent, our real world networks. Interacting with our networks' members delivers value, educates us, and connects us with things and people we want (or need) to know about. Replacing the tired, clumsy interfaces of existing social platforms with one that connects us to a traditional reading experience will drive even more interaction with our "social graph." As Flipboard integrates additional platforms into this flow (LinkedIn, anyone? Flickr?) we'll learn even more about which people in which network give us what we need and can use every day.
- Perhaps most important: The Flipboard approach avoids the temptation to create "an online version" of a traditional printed publication. This means the door is open just another inch or two to new concepts about the way that readers will receive, see, and interact with your communications. Sooner or later publishers will see the opportunity to do something they couldn't do by slavishly tethering their publications to proprietary web sites designed for desktop browsers.
Your thoughts?