Grown Up Thinking

So, after having highly anticipated the iPad and getting one on the day it came out, I found myself disappointed without a ton of use for it. Like all Apple products, the device was beautiful, had a great user experience and performed above expectations. It was just that nothing was new. The iPod changed how music was listened to, the iPhone brought about the mobile app ecosystem and both devices notably changed the way I did things from Day 1.

I kept saying the same would happen with the iPad, the applications just hadn’t caught up. Finally this week, I came across Flipboard and things started to change. Flipboard is a personalized social magazine, pulling content and shared links from your own Facebook or Twitter feeds and displaying them in magazine format, allowing you to flip through content that your social graph has created and shared specifically with you. You can even view curated lists by topics like sports, music, tech and fashion that pull stories from leading influencers in those areas based on what they are sharing in real time on their social networks.

Magazines and newspapers had already created some slick interfaces that turn pages in a similar way by swiping a finger but the content and even experience was largely the same. Similar to how these same publishers faltered and lost ground to blogs and content aggregators on the web because they tried to largely repurpose their content in a digital medium, publishers face the same challenges with new mobile and tablet platforms.

It is never about displaying the same content in a new fresh way. The true success stories of media when faced with disruptive technology are always those that fully embrace the new medium and develop a product that does things that completely alter how people consume content. Flipboard understands the immense amount of content that we now have to sort through from our social networks, the ability to leverage the personalized nature of this content and the emergence of a new device that now seems perfect for enabling us to consume this content en mass without being tied to a desk chair and computer screen. As a result, I’ve used my iPad more in the last two days than in the previous two weeks and my media consumption has once again been flipped on its head.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 at 12:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.