Our Thoughts

Flipboard – Beauty is Forgiveness

August 5, 2010 by Nathaniel Flick

Flipboard, “the world’s first social magazine,” has launched to much fanfare and it’s overshadowed a competitor first on the scene, Pulse, because it’s using its design and function (and it’s Twitter and Facebook backers) as an advance apology for appropriating the content of other websites. Pulse had its own issues when it launched  to the iTunes App Store after the Boston Globe and New York Times saw their content during a Steve Jobs’ keynote.

It’s a very interesting case of being able to push legal boundaries with great design. No one’s talking about Pulse now. It’s Flipboard’s show.

What Flipboard is doing is on the fringe of legality but since it’s beautiful and not yet profitable (though it has $10.5 Million in financing currently and is backed by a Twitter founder and the ex-CTO from Facebook among others) it has not yet come under legal attack.

The most obvious difference between Flipboard and Pulse is Flipboard scrapes content directly from websites and doesn’t immediately direct the user there as a normal RSS reader would, and as Pulse does – it uses the content, redesigns it, and embeds it. Only after further inspection can the user actually click through to the originating content page. The user can choose Twitter, Facebook and other sources from which to build her own magazine.

According to Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, beauty and convenience create a hierarchal organisation of social media content which he says will bring reluctant content creators to the table. Having Facebook and Twitter in its corner certainly doesn’t hurt.

In a YouTube interview with Robert Scoble, Mr. McCue gave some pretty telling sound bites about the fine line his app is treading. In short, Flipboard’s market proposition is as a content aggregator, but much like YouTube and other content aggregators before it, it exists in a very small space, a the end of the “Long Tail”. It’s beautiful design can’t hide the fact that it is scraping content without the permission of originating websites.

Normally we’re outraged by this, but not this time. Design has seduced us. Like a benign hacker who asks for forgiveness later and gets hired for a lucrative consulting contract, Flipboard is doing the same with it’s content collection. Pulse is well designed but with no hierarchy – ie. it’s less beautiful than Flipboard but it isn’t illegal with regard to content use.

A quick search on Twitter gives some great soundbites that support the claim that even sight unseen this Flipboard app is seductive:

“I’m only lukewarm enthusiasm for the iPad, but Flip Board app looks nice” – @nilshermans

“@flipboard when will u bring your app to the iPhone?? I’ve never tried your app but I’m excited from what I’ve heard.” – @colide81

“Tried Flipboard last night on iPad. Seemed bit just like a glorified RSS reader to me. Will keep trying to see what all the fuss is about” – @mikeyjhay

And in the CEO’s own words, Flipboard gives “hierarchy to social information”. He cleverly avoids calling it a news aggregator or content scraper for obvious reasons. Scoble questioned him regarding the scraping algorithm and how it will get smarter, it’s time ordered now, but later on stories will be ranked by content and social-weight. “Flipboard makes sense of twitter and repackages it for the average person.”

Bingo. Finally bringing Twitter to the masses; giving it further reason for being – the app and the iPad bring Twitter into the physical world via Flipboard, and thus the promised land of ubiquity.

Mr. McCue further states that he’s helping content creators get their content out to people and removes friction for content being published on social networks. Rather than having a stream of equally weighted links, they become organised according to user preference.

Not a new idea, but it helps his app gain some much-needed credibility.

In the future CEO McCue figures that, “…[Flipboard will need to] balance the advertising with the content along with subscriptions to content. The content has to be good for people to pay for it.”

Flipboard wants to be the source for that content. Beauty garners attraction from us social humans, and this is why Pulse will fade away and Flipboard will most likely triumph in the next 12 months by begging for forgiveness. From then on, it will put content control firmly in the hands of the user.

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