This past week, Flipboard, a personalized, social magazine app for the iPad, released a new version (Version 1.2) causing me to take a deeper look at this app. What I was hoping for was an alternative way of viewing the content I have set up in Google Reader through my Google Apps (for ATSU) account. My hopes were not disappointed. The combination of Flipboard and Google Reader is fantastic! My personalized content feeds really come to life with the beautiful layouts provided by Flipboard.
Over the past few months, I have learned how much time I can save in my professional reading by using an RSS news reader like Google Reader (see previous blog post). I have set up my Google Reader feeds into about 20 folders which are dedicated to a particular topic. I think of them as sections of a newspaper. I have folders for local news, humor, sports, and vendor news, just to name a few. By organizing my online reading into these sections, I can more easily stay up to date on topics of interest from several different sources side-by-side. I'm sure it saves me more hours per week.
With Flipboard, I can integrate the content from "folders" in my Google Reader configuration into "sections" within Flipboard. Now I simply click on a Flipboard section like "Open Education Courses" and all of my content is displayed in Flipboard with enhanced graphics and beautiful formatting. I can simply click on any article teaser (which usually is shown with a headline, source, date, and the first paragraph or so of the article) to get to the full content of the article. The response time is nearly immediate and the interface is incredibly intuitive. It is much easier than turning the Newspaper to page 4 to read the rest of a front page story.
Flipboard also uses the wonder of the iPad's page turning metaphor to go from page to page to see a new list of articles. Clicking on an article, or simply turning to the next page, triggers the "read" flag on Google articles so that I don't have to look at them more than once...even if I go back to the desktop or smartphone interface for Google Reader. All of my reading on Flipboard synchronizes back to my Google Reader account.
Another awesome feature is how easy it is to share articles from within Flipboard to the rest of my Google Reader followers. A simple click of an icon and I can choose to share an article not only on Google Reader, but through a variety of social tools, or even via email. I can also set up Flipboard sections for my other Social Network tools like Twitter, but the Twitter integration is limited in its ability to track which Tweets have been read.
All and all, I am VERY pleased with this new version. Being able to comment on my Google Reader feeds and share them is a huge benefit. I'd like to see a few more options for personalizing section names, etc. but I am hopeful these will be coming soon. I highly encourage any iPad fans to check out Flipboard and integrate it with your Google Reader account.
