flipboard for iphone + dedicated twitter account
Steve Conover
Flipboard has some prospect of being more than just a techie
phenomenon, so there's some hope that it might get a Reader-like
audience.
Good:
- Slick browsing interface
- Twitter integration
- Reader (feed) integration, plus all sorts of other integrations
Bad:
- Three clicks to share on twitter. Sometimes the posts it proposes
are > 140 chars. Harder than it needs to be.
- The nice convenient "star" on each item stars in Reader. Since
Reader is dead to me except as an OPML holder, this is useless.
- Posts are rendered in this cuetsy Flipboard way, where for instance
images are sometimes zoomed in. You click on the item and then you get
a pretty nicely done view of the RSS item in Flipboard. I don't know
why this view isn't the default, or what value this other view is...
...and in general, as a I click around Flipboard, there are all these
sharing settings and content views - too many. It feels indecisive,
like they're still trying to figure out the main content-browsing
flow, and there are one or two too many options and views.
- I have a Flipboard account now, but I can't figure out what the use
is. Maybe just so I can get back to my same setup from other iOS
devices? I expect/want a basic Flipboard user follow system - which,
because I only care about the quality of a user's shared content, need
only be the most basic follow system you could imagine.
That's a lot of bad. We're not out of the woods until we have a
comptent reader, "friends shared items", dead-simple+quick sharing,
and later, comments. But this is a step in the right direction.