Years ago, after Facebook released its news feed, I said that Facebook would soon become everyone's
favorite gossip rag - only the subjects stimulating our curiosity would be ourselves.
Now, with Flipboard, that prognistication has become a reality as friends' photos and posts are laid out with white space and formatting that makes the experience exactly like viewing People magazine online, with one exception: my friends are the editors, photographers and/or the celebrities.
Flipboard, which received $10.5 million in funding from Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, is an iPad application that calls itself a "social magazine." It turns your Facebook and Twitter interface into a beautifully-laid out online publication.
Friend's photo entries appear prominently, much like an image on an online newspaper or magazine.
Images of someone's lunch, like this photo posted by David Sifry (founder of Offbeat Guides and Technorati), looks like you're reading a gourmet magazine; photos of someone's trip looks like you're reading a travel magazine.
Short posts or Tweets stand out in their own little area, making even the simplest post look like poetry.
"Flipboard's elegant and graceful user interface has turned our ordinary social streams into an important daily news magazine worth paying attention to," said Pierre Wolff, consultant to high-tech startups.
"Who wouldn't want to consume content like this?" said Mark Goldstein, CEO and founder of Loyalty Lab. "Flipboard makes the most trivial things professionalized and more real... This will probably force people to be more careful about who and what and with whom they share."
Flipboard was founded by Mike McCue, whose last venture TellMe was sold for some $1 billion to Microsoft, and Evan Doll, a formger Apple engineer.
Thanks to Pierre-R Wolff for letting me check out his iPad and Facebook/Twitter accounts, and take pictures of his Facebook account on Flipboard.
Founder and CEO of Vator, a media and research firm for entrepreneurs and investors; Managing Director of Vator Health Fund; Co-Founder of Invent Health; Author and award-winning journalist.
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Offbeat Guides create personalized, up-to-date travel guides that cover over 30,000 travel destinations, using a combination of search technology and curation by both amateur and professional travel experts. Our guides scour the web to find the best, most up-to-date information about your destination. You can personalize the information you want based on your travel dates, preferences, and destination. The guides come with local maps, festivals and events going on while you're there, exchange rates, key phrases in the city's language, weather forecasts and more.
Travelers need reliable, accurate, and immediate information when planning a trip. Standard guidebooks are often 12 to 18 months out of date as soon as they hit the stores. Our information is the most up-to-date because we have an enormous technology base of spiders and crawlers that find the best information out on the internet, and combine it with information from established authors and thousands of locals who are always updating the information about where they live. We also believe strongly in Creative Commons, in which users can share, create and build information that is available for mixing and remixing into unique new applications. As well as Creative Commons licensed information, we also use proprietary content and professional authors, which makes for accurate and authoritative information in our guides. With Offbeat Guides, you can get your guide in electronic format that you print yourself, or we can create and ship you a printed guide just in time for your trip, with all the latest information packed inside.
Offbeat Guides is a technology and travel startup located in San Francisco. It was founded by Dave Sifry, the founder of multiple technology companies including Linuxcare and Technorati. Leveraging his management team's extensive experience in technology development and technology marketing, Offbeat Guides is using this knowledge and experience to advance travel publishing to a whole new level.
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