design

A few days ago I wrote about Flipboard – a new socially-connected information aggregation app for the iPad. The post focused on the potentially-nsfw display that Flipboard presents (how the twitter, facebook and other streams are not censored for image-content).

Hopefully, a future will arrive that allows for apps to recognize content-levels automatically, possibly giving users a flip-switch (or options) to change the level of work-appropriateness they’d like content to adhere.

Until that time, I’m moving on to another area of focus on Flipboard: how much it has altered the way I consume local news content on my iPad.

To-date, there were three options for me to consume my local newspaper on my iPad:
1. Use their iPhone application in 2x view (not ideal).
2. Use their Web site in Safari (Flash interstitial ads make that less than ideal as well).
3. Use an RSS reader, such as Feeddler (lately my number-one choice).

Well, that’s changed with Flipboard.

As I wrote previously, Flipboard grabs links and external content mentioned by tweets and facebook posts, parsing the content and presenting it in a beautiful display. For instance, say you tweeted about Brier Dudley’s tech blog (with a shortened URL to a story/post). Flipboard would follow that URL and present a user with the story in all it’s textual glory. Tweets without a url are just presented as tweets, urls are processed and displayed as stories.

For me, this has made browsing the Seattle Times online much more enjoyable. I don’t get 100% of the content from their mobile or full Web site (as the only stories I’ll see are those that are tweeted from the @seattletimes account), but what I do see I enjoy. A great example of how much I’ve used Flipboard for consuming the Times: I just read a golf story (“Steady Bernhard Langer wins US Senior Open“).

Another nice feature: if a story contains an image, the image is presented along with the story, re-flowing in portrait or landscape.

Here’s some photos of what I’ve been seeing:

What about the legality, you ask?

I’ve been asked (and have read) “Is this legal?” I’m not a legal expert, but here’s my two-cent opinion:
1. The @seattletimes twitter account posts links to their own content, hoping users will click-through to read the stories. Flipboard presents that content in-part (I haven’t found a story short enough that it’s entire content is displayed by Flipboard). So one could argue that Flipboard is helping get users to the ST Web site in more volume. I find the content that Flipboard presents to be a good “teaser;” helping me decide if I really want to “read on web” (read more).
2. By presenting – even as a partial – the ST content without advertising, readers may escape the ABC statistics (an industry standard for measuring performance; also used to determine ad costs). This is a bad thing, and in my opinion the number-one reason why a publisher would disagree with their content being aggregated outside their control. From what I understand, newspapers rely heavily on the ABC numbers to determine what to charge for advertisements (a major part of their revenue); if readership drops (because potential visitors are not clicking-through to the full Web site), then advertising rates plummet, causing layoffs and the dreaded mantra “newspapers are dead.”

Summary

To summarize, I’m warming up to Flipboard. I’d love to see RSS feeds added, but I understand that’s not really their model (RSS is already organized – the brains behind Flipboard deal more with digging to discover the “meat”). I still have an entire page on my iPad devoted to news reading – from the AP, to the Seattle Times application, RSS readers, Time and Wired, etc.

The “news” page on my iPad. I go through each of these apps before bed. Sure, some aren’t really “news,” but there’s enough similarity to the apps to keep them all on one screen. Yes, I have the same “News” group on my iPhone.

For now, I’ll keep flipping through Flipboard as part of my nightly routine (I read all my news sources just before bed). If something better comes along I’ll discuss it. In the meantime, I may miss some stories from Flipboard, but I’m sure I’ll find the rest using my page of apps.