One possible glitch is that most of that material doesn't belong to Ebert-or Flipboard. It means that we're stumbling toward a completely customized form of journalism, and it shows how the media business is being transformed not by giant conglomerates but rather by tiny shops in Silicon Valley. Now anyone who is gathering up Twitter feeds is, in effect, curating a magazine. It sounds simple, but it's actually pretty profound. But reading Ebert on Flipboard is amazing-suddenly you've subscribed to this wonderful little magazine run by a really smart, funny editor. Reading him on Twitter is a pain because you have to click on each link. Ebert sends out a stream of links to eclectic articles and photos. I follow film critic Roger Ebert's Twitter feed, for example. To browse, you just flip with your fingertip, the way you would turn the pages of a magazine. What's the big deal? Flipboard has found a way to take the news feeds that you get from friends on Facebook and Twitter and turn them into what McCue calls "the world's first social magazine." Instead of the ugly little links to articles you have on Twitter, on Flipboard you get a glimpse of the original articles and photos, laid out the way they might be in a magazine. But the reaction to the free Flipboard app, he says, is "like nothing I've ever seen before." We never anticipated it would be so instantaneous," says cofounder and CEO Mike McCue.Ī decade ago, McCue, now 43, founded Tellme Networks (which made software that lets people search for things like stock quotes and movie listings using voice commands over the telephone) and sold it to Microsoft in 2007 for a reported $800 million. "It's just an incredible reaction that we've gotten.
Two weeks later it finally got everyone signed up. Engineers scurried around trying to fix the problem, but after 36 hours, the only thing Flipboard could do was put people on a waiting list. This tiny company (19 employees) launched its first iPad app in July, and so many people wanted to download it that within 20 minutes Flipboard's servers were maxed out. Things have been pretty wild around the headquarters of Flipboard lately.