A personalized social magazine

Flipboard is a media aggregation app that pulls content from a wide variety of sources and creates a magazine layout of the information to read. As opposed to showing entire webpages, the app formats the content to read like a magazine article.

Curating content

Much like an RSS feed, Flipboard imports content from many different sources and publishes it in the app. This includes not just sites, but also hashtags, people, blogs and trending topics. You can also connect a number of social networks, such as your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Google+ accounts into the feed of content and add other sites through their RSS feeds, which will display their content in the main menu of Flipboard.

You can save articles to your personalized magazine to read offline later or share with friends, like and comment. This personalization is only likely to improve with Flipboard’s acquisition of Zite, a news aggregator that focuses on finding content that is relevant to each individual and often can´t be found on social network or other news aggregation sites.

Intuitive and easy to use

Using Flipboard is intuitive. Swiping up and down will switch between articles, and tapping will open them. You always have the option of opening the original source in Flipboard if there is some content missing. Adding new content is very easy – a tap on the red ribbon will bring up not only a list of relevant publications, but also lists of these publications grouped by topic, such as ‘Mac apps’, which you can add in one click.

Top news sites such as the BBC and Mashable also work on providing Flipboard-optimized articles so that their content reads well in this format.

The Flipboard app for tablets has been improved over the last few years meaning that it now works as well and looks as good for seven-, eight- and ten-inch devices as it does for phones. Flipboard also now supports embedded videos in posts whereas before, when loading content, the app could only access text and images to make posts.

Leader in news aggregation

In a crowded market**, Flipboard is one of the best e-magazine readers available**, being easy to use and intuitive, while providing ever better personalization, increased connection with social networks and looking slick and stylish.