How Flipboard Turned Web Noise Into iPad Gold

Evan Doll

Every day from morning to night, Maria Popova hunts for digital gold on the web.

Some of her finds: A neuroscientist explains how brains feel emotion. A lost, unpublished Dr. Seuss manuscript resurfaces. An infographic breaks down the economics of the hamburger.

Under the Twitter handle @brainpicker, Popova shares every nugget she can find with her 37,000 followers. But as interesting as all this content may be, her Twitter.com profile, like everyone else’s, is little more than a pile of plain links and text.

And this is why the Flipboard app for iPad is a godsend for readers, and why we’re excited that Wednesday’s new software update adds several new features. It grabs photos, text or video from links in a Twitter stream like Popova’s and stitches them into a magazine-like layout with neatly arranged panes, lots of white space and beautiful typography.

So when looking at Popova’s Twitter feed on Flipboard, you see part of the burger infographic she mentions, alongside an excerpt from the interview with the neuroscientist and a clip of the lost Dr. Seuss book. Swiping your finger across the iPad screen flips to another page of her content (left goes back chronologically and right takes you forward).

When you launch Flipboard, the main screen displays a grid of nine large tiles, each one representing a section (see picture at top of the post). The Facebook tile loads a Flipboard-ized version of your friends’ status updates; tapping the general Twitter tile shows content from people you follow in the same magazine fashion.�You can also add sections for specific Twitter feeds you’d like to read (like @wired), and it’ll do its magic.

The new version of Flipboard that just went live in the App Store adds the ability to magazine-ify content from your Flickr stream, Google feeds and Facebook groups.

It’s all extremely easy to set up; you’ll be flipping around in minutes.

The end result is a visually rich magazine that’s alive — breathing with content posted by people you care about on the internet. (Hell, Flipboard looks so good you’ll start appreciating photos and comments from people you don’t care much about, too.)

If only the web could be this much fun on its own. In fact, a superior browsing experience is exactly what gave rise to Flipboard.

“One of our first thought experiments was, how would you re-imagine a web browser?” said Evan Doll, an ex-Apple engineer and co-founder of Flipboard.

Evan Doll

“We love magazines,” he added. “There’s something great in terms of the graphic design, typography and emphasis on the visual side. And there’s also the fact you have editorial — someone filtering down the new stuff, telling you what’s important, interesting and worthwhile. Both those things we wanted to try to marry with social.”

The wedding is generating a lot of buzz. Apple last week named�Flipboard as the best iPad app of the year. That same week, the startup announced partnerships with major media outlets including The Washington Post, Bon Appetit and the San Francisco Chronicle.

The Flipboard team is only a year old, and it has already received $10 million in funding from stars like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and actor Ashton Kutcher.

That’s a good thing, but it also means that Flipboard is going to have to make money — not easy for an app that’s free in the iTunes App Store.

Doll says the team is still hatching a plan to rake in cash, which could involve embedding advertisements into Flipboard pages or splitting micropayments with content creators. And it’s not just creators, but also prolific content sharers like Popova that Flipboard would like to help earn money.

“She should be able to do that as her full-time job,” Doll said of Popova. “She’s a one-woman magazine.”

Flipboard download link [iTunes]

Price: Free

Category: Media

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com