OK, first up I promise this is my last post about Flipboard....for tonight.
So why am I (and many others) going on about Flipboard being released on Android? Cause it's one of the best, if not the best, news/RSS/social reader app available. It was a major justification for me to buy an iPad, and I know many others who felt the same.
Turning your ordinary RSS/news feeds into a magazine format makes it a breeze to browse and presents usually dry, static content in a visually stimulating way. But it's real standout feature in my eyes is it's twitter integration.
One of the main issues I've always had with Twitter is that while great content is available, you always have to follow a link to get to it. So a lot of the time, I wasn't encouraged to visit the links as the twitter post about it was often too short, and unable to capture my interest.
Where Flipboard adds value to this experience is by preloading some of the content from the twitter link (main picture/article title/introductory blurb) and displaying it in a easily readable format with a focus on the article linked rather than the tweet itself. This allows me to have a much better idea about what the link is about and raises the likelihood of browsing to that link myself.
The other advantage is that I can use Twitter lists to curate the content that I consume for various topics such as news and technology. A twitter list I have generated is a Perth news list; in which I add the twitter accounts of local news sources. It includes some well known, major news organisations but also smaller independent news companies that I would not have access to normally via mainstream media.
These are the type of apps that are showing people just what is possible in the post-PC era.