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wow! flipboard : aggregation with social context

Down­loaded Flip­board app for our brandy new iPad. Both the iPad and Flip­board are pretty sweet. First time at Flip­board you load your con­tent zones; each with a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory. Tax­on­omy is a real dri­ver in this mag­a­zine. The sec­ond big dri­ver is your social net­work. Unfor­tu­nately the inter­est in this app was under­es­ti­mated by it’s team and they can’t acti­vate the new users fast enough. We’re get­ting impa­tient and it hasn’t been 72 hours.

Why are we impa­tient? Because we want to share with peo­ple we know. This aug­ments our use of twit­ter in a very intu­itive way. We man­age pages at Face­book and would love to share in my more open ways — as in with­out Face­book. Shar­ing means step­ping out­side of a net­work – that’s what makes twit­ter so open and what makes Face­book so closed.

We’re look­ing for­ward to using Flip­board full-tilt when our twit­ter and if nec­es­sary Face­book accounts can be tied in.

So until then we are thrilled to read their well designed feeds that feel exactly like a mag­a­zine that we would have built. It’s one with cul­ture, sci­ence, and tech with words, amaz­ing images, and video too. It’s wicked fast and the origami flip feels really good.

It’s a beau­ti­ful and easy to to use inter­face but can be a bit con­fus­ing when you step in and out of read­ing on the web. Most dis­con­cert­ing things dis­ap­pear, well repo­si­tion them­selves if you have looked at them once. This is the most dif­fi­cult aspect of fluid mag­a­zines. How do I find that again? Maybe it will be eas­ier when your social net­work cre­ates a level of impor­tance and con­ver­sa­tions begin. We’ll see.

First expe­ri­ence with Flip­board? It alone makes the iPad worthwhile.

About Flip­board:

Founded by Mike McCue, for­mer CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, for­mer senior iPhone engi­neer at Apple®, Flip­boardTM began a quest today to trans­form how peo­ple dis­cover and share con­tent by com­bin­ing the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. Flip­board also announced the imme­di­ate avail­abil­ity of itʼs Flip­board App for iPadTM, a social mag­a­zine that brings to life the sto­ries, pho­tos, news and updates being shared across Twit­ter and Face­book. Flipboardʼs first pub­lic demo will hap­pen at the FORTUNE Brain­storm Tech con­fer­ence in Aspen, Col­orado at 4:40pm MDT tomorrow.