Oct 14, 2012

Flipboard, The Ultimate Social Media Client?

Ever since I got hooked to social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc., social application clients had become my most used on my phone or tablet opening it first and last every time I grasped either of them. This is also the reason why I'm so picky in choosing a social client that supports them all. Let just say that I've tried everything there was on Symbian, iOS and Android platform and settled for Gravity (Symbian) as the ultimate of them all not until I discovered Flipboard (iOS/Android) offering the most beautiful and intuitive interface challenging my beloved Gravity.


Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboard was designed to give users the best reading experience by just flipping through Facebook newsfeeds, Twitter timelines and news from around the globe helping users find the things that can inform, entertain or even inspire them most every day.

Quite true indeed because you can easily access social networks and feeds from just any website in a visually rich format. To mention a few of my favorites, a curated special feed page for National Geographic, Technology, Men's Health, Rotten Tomatoes, Rolling Stones, Travel, Photos and so much more, users can choose from the rest of its featured feed links on the following categories; News, Business, Tech and Science, Video, Cool Curators, Photos and Design, Living, Entertainment, Sports, Travel, Style and Local. The information links on Flipboard is limitless as users can search and subscribe to any Twitter or Facebook account, or just any other websites in the web space that supports RSS feed.

Perhaps the best feature I love about the app was its user interface, its smooth and intuitive that I find it fun to flip pages up and down. Its somewhat similar to the Windows Phone 7 tile mechanism except that its not active and that these tiled style windows had the ability to render images of current feed being pushed through it during an update. Tapping the window tile would give you a sub-window showing the full image and the first few sentences of the article being feed. Users can then access the full story by clicking the opened sub-window.

Some of the app's drawbacks includes limited social network support (no Foursquare, Get Glue, Instagram among the rest of the popular social networking sites on it), limited Twitter and Facebook features like its inability to view current trends, run multiple twitter accounts among others and the feed subscription is only limited to 23.

But nonetheless, the app is excellent that I'm already hooked to it. I could even say that I'm using the app more now than Gravity, but when it comes to the idea of being the "Ultimate Social Media Client", its not just yet as developers still needs to tweak and add a few more support before they could take the crown from Gravity. But I believe this won't take long to figure. I just hope they could add a Windows Phone and Symbian operating system support as well to cover everyone.

For Gravity, I also wish for it to evolved and its developers to introduce more innovations to the app defend its throne. God luck to both and keep those creative juice flowing.

Flipboard by the way is FREE to download on App Store and Goggle Play.

1 comments:

Flipboard only launched its Android app recently. The app allows users to browse through their Facebook, Twitter and Google+ streams, as well as Google Reader feeds in a beautiful flipping manner. It also consolidates and curates a stream of important stories for those who are too busy to go through everything. As a blogger, using this app and browsing through interesting news content daily will give you fresh ideas on what to write about in your next blog post.

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