Flipboard is a genuinely disruptive web app

If you have an iPad, you should really check out Flipboard. Flipboard revolutionizes the way we see social media. It takes clips of websites and social media feeds and presents them in a visually attractive magazine format for easy reading. Users touch the screen to "flip" through pages of (free) media and social content.

A serious challenge for media owners
And there´s the challenge for media owners. Flipboard basically delivers free of charge, what journalists used to call "The Daily Me". It filters out advertising and delivers a digital magazine experience based on content that users have already approved via their social media feeds. For blogs and even some media publications there´s little need to visit the original newspaper, magazine or blog sites, since the packaged version, based on for example a RSS feed from a newspaper section may provide most of the daily updates.

Last month Flipboard started to integrate television feeds with Comedy Central's The Colbert Report being first up, sharing clips from recent shows and tweets from the show and Colbert's Twitter account. Flipboard has said it will have full video support for the app by the end of the year. The company is also gearing up to release an iPhone app.

Flipboard´s Business Model 
Just 12 months old and with over 4m downloads, Flipboard is becoming a highly visible and disruptive media company. It produces no content itself, but monetizes web content on behalf of its media partners. Its business model is to provide its users with an attractive, printed page like reading experience and to make money by taking a cut of partners ad revenues. The new advertising initiative means people reading for instance Conde Nast’s technology magazine Wired, will be served several full page adverts, while the user is ‘flipping’ through their content. If users then tap on the advert, they are directed to the brand’s website or Facebook page for additional information. Each magazine and newspaper will be responsible for selling their own advertising space via the app. It still remains to be seen how users will react to the adverts.

Flipboard´s CEO Mike McCue claimed last week at Web2.0 in San Francisco that websites of the future ‘will look like newspapers and magazines’. “The tablet is such a big deal because now for the firs time information becomes the interface. It becomes the way you navigate through the content. Now you just swipe and you magically have a gateway to content with an order and rhythm that editors can put together to tell a story"".

How Flipboard can change user behavior
Flipboard represents a significant step in the trend towards a slower, richer state of interaction between human and Internet - a state where we engage with Internet content not as information but experience. It is one of the first applications to truly use the full capabilities of the iPad interface.

For years people have talked about delivering the "personalized newspaper" or "personalized magazine". Flipboard gives you more of what you want by simply tapping into your social graph.  This eliminates a huge amount of what is typically difficult about building a customized media experience.

The big question is how Flipboard will continue to monetize the media sources it links to. Flipboad has proven it can deliver a transformative user experience - can it match that with a business model that is sustianable?