Patty Keegan: A new way to view your social media

I bought an iPad in December and was overjoyed to recently receive an email from my local Mac reseller promoting the same model for $150 less than I paid, in anticipation of the launch of iPad 2. But I’ve gotten a lot of use out of mine over the past three months and have no regrets!

Late last year The Australian

reported that there had been more than seven million iPads sold worldwide since the beginning of 2010. An AdMob report says that Australia makes up 2 per cent of the total worldwide distribution. Based on that, there are around 140,000 iPads in the country. Part of me knows I have the iPad just because I think I should (to know how it works so I can tell our clients about it); it’s not because I’m compelled by the volumes of content. But it’s early days and more content becomes available daily.

It’s interesting to see which publishers have (and haven’t) got iPad content, what’s free and what isn’t. It’s definitely a space to watch as more content becomes available and more publishers try to extract dollars from consumers for their iPad apps. But that’s another column!

What I want to write about here is one of the free apps that I’m really enjoying – Flipboard (http://flipboard.com/). If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a social magazine.” If you’re on Facebook or Twitter and have an iPad, proceed immediately to the app store and download Flipboard.

Once downloaded, you can enter your Facebook and/or Twitter details and those streams are turned into magazines”. It takes the links from your feeds and puts them into a visually appealing and easy to read format that’s attractive and does look like a publication. There’s no advertising on Flipboard which begs the question – what’s the business model?

I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to take the Flipboard version of my Digital Chameleon Facebook stream and distribute it as an e-newsletter. I would think other marketers would want to do similar, as it makes a visually (not to mention information-rich) compelling product. Perhaps there’s a business model here?

Flipboard is less than a year old, and if you read the reviews from hardcore social media types you’ll see that it does have limitations, but I love the concept. It’s an engaging new way to look at our social media, expressly made for the iPad platform. It’s interesting to see the differences between the look and feel of my personal Facebook feed, versus the Digital Chameleon on Facebook, versus my Twitter feed. The content is clickable,” and can be shared and commented on from the application. It surely makes Twitter easier to read and make sense of. Flipboard apparently senses engaged” items with lots of comments or retweets, as well as photos, so that it filters out the best” content and visuals.

Isn’t it funny how we always approach a new medium/platform with our old platform” sensibilities? iPad is an exciting new device but I wonder how long it will take before content developed for the iPad will start to look less like a newspaper or magazine and more like something we can’t yet imagine.