Flipboard for iPad -- Using Social Networks to Determine News

Flipboard is billed as the first social magazine. It uses the group brain -- or at least the brains on Twitter and Facebook -- to figure out what is and isn't important news. And it's going to be a huge deal.

It determines the news by scanning Twitter and Facebook streams of your choosing -- including your personal streams (once you log in), Twitter lists, Facebook groups, etc. to create Flips. These Flips can be around a particular topic or a service as a whole.

Beyond the interesting and innovative brains behind the gathering of the content, this app is absolutely beautiful. Of course considering the developers I'd expect nothing less. You start the app and flip open the cover to see your Flips (think of them as subjects or channels). Each Flip is updated fairly quickly with new content when the sources update. In my tests it was updated surprisingly fast.

Once you get into a Flip, a simple touch is used to expand any story to near full screen. From there you can give it a thumbs up, share it on Twitter, or via email.

Take a look at the video below from Flipboard for a demo and more info on the app.

Flipboard the company was founded by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple. You may remember Evan Doll as the instructor of the Stanford iPhone programming class that is available through iTunes U from Spring 2009. At that point he was still an engineer at Apple. He has since left the mothership to create Flipboard.

Unfortunately the app has only been out an hour and their servers are already overloaded. It looks like they put the word out in a huge way though as I got a recommendation to take a look at Flipboard from 4 different people in just a matter of moments after it's release. Seems like growing pains, I expect them to be fixed quickly.

Flipboard may just be the real thing. What I've been able to see so far, I'm really impressed by. Once they solve their server issues I look forward to diving in deeper. Flipboard is going to be a big deal and it's currently free.

Download it and give it a shot. Let us know in the comments what you think.

Hit the jump for a few more screen shots and a video look at the app from Robert Scoble.

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