In case you’re wondering just exactly what is Flipboard, it is an application launched last Wednesday for the iPad.  MacNewsWorldRating explained it this way:  Flipboard’s concept has plenty of potential: It takes the idea of an RSS news feed, marries it with the update feeds you get from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, and displays it all on the iPad with a layout that takes on the eye-pleasing style of a magazine.

Flipboard combines information from Facebook and Twitter to create a personalized magazine on the iPad — a “social” magazine, as the service calls it. While gleaning information from social network feeds is a new twist on the customized content theme, what really distinguishes Flipboard from other efforts in this vein is the stylish way it’s able lay out that information — in either portrait or landscape mode — on the iPad’s display.

“With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web,” Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue said. “The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple websites just to stay up to date.

“We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream,” he added.

It’s unusual these days to hear anyone praising any aspect of print, but all one has to do is compare a Web page of Tweets to a Flipboard page to know what McCue is talking about. On a noise scale of 100, the Twitter page is a 100 and Flipboard less than zero.

“We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream,”  is music to my ears.  We are still drawn to the layout, design and creative space used in newspapers, magazines and books.  The digital/virtual replica of print publications preserves and enhances the way we like to read.  An online “magazine” of our own creation with content aggregated from the Web is obviously very appealing, hence Flipboard’s crashed server. We are a multi-tasking, mass-quantities of bite-sized information consuming, multi-device loving, and technologically advanced bunch of humans drowning in the noise of a constant stream of information.  And we love it.  So why was Flipboard such a huge success on the first day they launched? As much as we love it, it is incredibly time-consuming to sort through and read every website, blog, tweet and Facebook entry we find interesting.  To aggregate information into one “publication”  with only information we want is content nirvana.  But why the “magazine style”? It is encapsulated in one place, has the space for beautiful, compelling graphics, and has the comfortable, page-flipping aspects we’ve known our entire existence. 

Printed books, magazines and yes, even newspapers will never totally go away.  To have access to them in a digital, interactive version just extends the beauty of their content, which is different than the bite-sized information we consume daily. The publications we like to read have well researched, lengthy, in-depth articles that draw us in and give us detailed information you can’t get with Twitter, Facebook or a blog without connecting to all the hyperlinks therein. Yes, the online publication will have video and hyperlinks, but the article itself will give you the entire story with details in one place.  We love our information sources, but we still want the familiar layout, design and beauty of the well-written word with pictures…like a book…like a magazine.  To me, it just feels like home.

More about Flipboard from Hubspot