Flipboard is referred to as the world’s first social magazine. The fact that it was Apple’s iPad app of the year for 2010 is enough to let you have an idea of how really good this app is. First thing you notice after launching the app is the beautiful presentation of news in a slideshow. Sliding you finger across the screen opens your ‘favorites’ screen where you have your news sources and room to add more sources. There’s an option to add Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr and other feeds to the favorites screen. Opening pages may not appear as slick as in the Classics app or iBooks but with the presentation here, this might not be necessary. 
On the social side, the app allows you to tweet, update your Facebook status and access a whole lot of other social services. Flickr looks beautiful as it also gives you room to comment on photos. As for twitter, there is no function to view or create Direct Messages but after I was able to get in touch with John Virtes, the community manager for Flipboard, he was kind enough to let me know that they might be adding a Direct Message functionality soon. Flipboard is looking to expand very soon with the addition of TV shows. This is not something I’m really looking forward to because there will definitely be restrictions as to where you can watch the shows from and besides not everyone has the bandwith to stream TV shows…in HD…from a server in North America! In all, it’s a really good app for news consumption and for some really relaxing social experience. They are so many other really cool features that you’ll have to use the app yourself to find out. And for the price of zero bucks, I don’t see you getting broke for downloading this app. NB: It is currently only available on the iPad but an iPhone release, they say, will be coming soon. No word about Android or Windows Phone yet. 
