Flipboard combines a periodical news reader with social networks news in a magazine style format. Mike McCue and Evan Doll initially created this unique approach for the iPad in early 2010. By December of 2010, versions were released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The unique design of the app quickly made it one of the most popular iOS apps. Flipboard received Apple’s iPad App of the year in 2010. In May of 2012, the Samsung Galaxy S III included a beta version of Flipboard for Android. On June 24, Flipboard became available on the Google Play Store.

When you first start Flipboard, you get the icons for Cover Stories and for each news feed selected. If you use Google Currents, you navigate by swiping to the left to move forward and swiping to the right to move backward. With Flipboard, you move forward by swiping up, and backward by swiping down. To select a news category, you simply tap the icon. Unlike Goolge Currents, or Pulse, Flipboard does not have an index of articles. Instead, you flip through the articles until you find one that you wish to read. You then tap on the summary to read the full article.

Like Google Currents, you flip to the last page of your news sources and click the plus icon to add a news source. Sources with the Flipboard logo superimposed on the news source logo are those that are specifically formatted for Flipboard. The news sources are divided into categories to simplify finding the news sources of interest. The default listing of news content guide is for the United States. By clicking on the settings icon of any source page, except the first page, you can select the country that you wish to use for your content guide. Only one country, of the 15 choices, can be selected. In comparison, Google Currents provides a much broader International coverage.

While Google Currents and Pulse use RSS feeds for news sources, Flipboard uses Twitter feeds. At least, every news source that I viewed showed Twitter as the source of the news item. This explains the different formatting of the articles, as Flipboard follows the link to the article. For Flipboard optimized sites, you flip through the article. For other news sources, you scroll the article up and down, but there is no page flipping. Occasionally, you get a full Web page for the article. It all depends on the link in the Tweet.

What makes Flipboard unique is its integration with social networks. At a minimum, you need to create a Flipboard account. It also has predefined feeds for your Facebook and Twitter account. You can also link Flipboard to your 500px, Flickr, Google+, Google Reader, Instagram, LinkedIn, Renren, Sina Weibo, Tumblr, and YouTube accounts. Each account is formatted such that you can flip through the posts in your account. With YouTube, Flipboard has a split personality. It displays the feed, but depends on the YouTube app to display the video. With Google Reader, you gain access to the RSS feeds defined for your Google Reader account. While it seems to be somewhat inconsistent, posts from your social networks may appear as Cover Stories.

Flipboard does not run in the background. Instead, it updates all the feeds when you swipe down after launching the application. If you have a lot of feeds, it may take awhile for Flipboard to perform the update cycle. Every time you go back to the top page, it will automatically update all the feeds.

Flipboard only works in a portrait mode, and does not support auto-rotation. For content that is wider than the screen width, you will need to scroll to the left to see videos and graphics that are set to a fixed width.

When it comes to sharing, Flipboard is Twitter centric. The share buttons at the top of the article allow you to reTweet, Favorite on Twitter, and Comment on Twitter. The share button, itself, provides two options: Share Link to Twitter, or Share to Other Apps. If you long tap on an article summary, you get the same share options, plus options for reading later, viewing on the Web and flagging as inappropriate. The last three options are available while reading an article by tapping the menu icon.

While integrating news sources with status feeds from your social networks in a magazine style is a unique approach, I don’t see it as a killer app. In my opinion, I would rather use the social network app, which provides a more complete view of the its features. Using Twitter as a source for news may get different results than RSS feeds, but that depends on the news source. When it comes to magazine style readers, I still prefer Google Currents.