The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

I am someone who enjoys a twitter or two. I mean, I look at my twitter all the time. I have a monitor partially dedicated to just displaying tweetdeck at all times.

Flipboard is quickly becoming my favorite way to look at twitter.

Okay, so the webpage and the demo video seem pretentious as fuck, and I’m sure anyone who has had an iPad before me already knows about Flipboard, but seriously, it’s kind of amazing. Twitter is, in many ways, the way I get the news that I give a shit about. I follow cool people who link cool things, and Flipboard will magically lay out a whole day’s worth of tweets and all the articles and pictures within it and make it easy to browse and see what I missed. I can tap on the blurbs to pull up the articles in the app, tap on pictures to make them full screen, and tap on videos to play them. It even, somehow, knows which tweets that don’t include content are the cooler ones, and will just put little statements in big boxes alongside the articles to make me chuckle. I have no idea how it does this. It rarely highlights tweets that aren’t amazing. Everything is laid out in a nice-looking way. It is really kind of magic. You just don’t often see a lot of thought being put into the design of things that aggregate content like this.

I don’t know if I would have paid for it before I tried it, but now that I have, I really would drop a few bucks on this. I don’t have to, of course, but I would. It is a fantastic way to read web content, to the point that I find myself opening it to look at what’s going on on twitter when I’m sitting in front of the computer here. I kind of wish I could plug in straight RSS feeds into it to create a separate little Flipboard magazine of all the blogs and stuff I read when I remember to. That would also be awesome. I’m not sure how to do that unless those blogs have twitter posts, though. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it’s just a different app for that sort of thing. Maybe I just need to follow the twitters of more blogs I like. But I wouldn’t enjoy just a straight stream of links… hm.

In any case, Flipboard is made for the platform, works flawlessly every time I use it, and is totally free. If that’s not a reason to grab it, I don’t know what is. I’m sure I’ll keep using it at least once a day. I mean, we’ll see of course, but yeah. Solid.