One would think that being named to the board of directors of one of the hottest private companies on the Web on the same day they announced a raise of a rumored $200 million would be an incredible achievement in itself. But if this announcement was simply the first part of a 1-2 punch, followed by a major update to the company's signature award-winning application, that's quite a day. That's how Wednesday looked for Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, who ends the day as one of the two newest members on Twitter's Board of Directors, as well as the owner of an increasingly fun to use iPad app that pulls in content from your social streams and RSS subscriptions in an extremely appealing way.

When Flipboard debuted in July of this year, the application brought an immersive magazine-like approach to consuming Facebook and Twitter streams on the iPad. The simplicity and beauty of the app has spawned many competitors to try and bring the look and feel of Flipboard to their apps. New startups emerged calling their products "Flipboard-like" and others were referred to by press as "Flipboard killers". Of course, usually when someone says you're going to be killed, you're actually doing quite well. Such is the case for Flipboard.


I had the opportunity to sit in a session beside Mike at the Newsfoo conference in Phoenix two weeks ago, and he clearly explained the casual nature of many of the app's users, who flip pages and enjoy the content served up by their friends. While many apps (including my6sense) are aiming for a "less is more" strategy, he relayed that in fact, for this particular experience, "more is more", as users pushed for the addition of Twitter list support and new services. Tonight's addition saw the pull of new services that should impact adoption even more - including that of Google Reader (my personal favorite) and Flickr.


Now, instead of quirky work-arounds (apologies to Rick Klau) to get to one's feeds, you can add Google Reader and Flickr to Flipboard, making the product more of a great-looking aggregator (albeit service by service one at a time). The application also delivered a much-requested feature to share items out to social networks, alongside a custom URL, making it a more compelling experience.


Robert Scoble, arguably the loudest evangelist for Flipboard since its launch, says tonight's introduction isn't the one he is waiting for, as he continues to look for intelligence in the app, promised from the company's acquisition of Ellerdale. Obviously, I am eager to see that develop also, but for those folks looking to put their feet up and consume their feeds in a nice way, the addition of these new services is welcome.

As for Mike, that's a pretty good Wednesday. Being named to the board of directors for Twitter and launching a new version of the app isn't half bad. It's pretty close to the 1-2 punch I pulled off with announcing the VP of Marketing role at my6sense on August 23rd and Braden being born on August 24th. But I can see how Flipboard is Mike's baby. What's planned for Thursday? (You can download Flipboard from iTunes here)

Disclosure: I am VP of Marketing for my6sense, which theoretically can be seen as competition for some aspects of Flipboard and Ellerdale.

The iPad played a major role in today's record-setting earnings from Apple, and strong sales of the device are helping developers find new ways to leverage the product's screen and form factor, at the intersection of the portability of the mobile Web and the power of a desktop. Tonight, a new company called Flipboard debuts with an iPad app that brings your social streams into a completely new light - no longer the world of chronologically ordered status updates and one-liners, but instead, rich graphical pages, which can be flipped, like a magazine from one screen to the next as you go further back in time. The result is a highly compelling way to consume the news your friends share, and it immediately trumps all other RSS-based solutions for the iPad in terms of user experience.

Flipboard emerges tonight after lifting the shroud of secrecy on the project. The company has raised millions from VC firms including Kleiner Perkins, and the company has already made an acquisition, that of the Ellerdale Project. The Ellerdale team will be leaving their Menlo Park offices and joining Flipboard in Palo Alto at the combined companies' new headquarters, as they work on the new app. As I met with the team today, they described the fit as a perfect combination of Flipboard having an amazing front-end with Ellerdale providing strong back-end data. Ellerdale, if you may recall, was among the first partners to gain full access to Twitter's firehose of data.



Upon downloading Flipboard to the iPad, users are prompted to follow a number of curated collections of news sources, supplied by the app, or to connect their social streams, starting with Twitter and Facebook, to one of 9 squares, aligned in a 3x3 grid. You can even add Twitter lists you have made, to see a subset of those you follow in a new way.

Future versions of the app are expected to offer more than nine tiles, and will also see support for new networks, likely including Google Buzz.

After years of getting used to paging from the top down to see one-liner updates with a URL that launches a Web browser, Flipboard brings us back to the more traditional days of a cover page and flipping casually left to right to get to later pages of a magazine. Rich media from Twitter, Facebook or any other feed is displayed in line, including photos and video, and Web links are displayed with a preview excerpt of the story - while clicking out takes you to Safari on the iPad.


In the past few years, we have seen the debate rage of whether Twitter has surpassed RSS readers in terms of finding the best content on the Web quickly. Flipboard helps make services like Twitter and Facebook much closer to RSS readers, with a much friendlier UI that makes sense even to the most casual non-geek.

  Browsing Facebook on Flipboard is Actually Enjoyable

As the company described a meeting I had with them earlier today, this is the first "social magazine" for the iPad. The first page shows the most recent items from your stream, diving into the links shared from all those you follow, and as you flip the page left to right, you go back in time. Every person using the application has a different set of content and a personalized experience, based on their own social network.


While the application itself is downloadable for free, Flipboard is already thinking about rich ways to receive revenue. They explained their plans for full-page high quality ads, much like those in print magazines, and used similar language to that of Apple and iAds. But they didn't talk about a way to reward original content creators, or their downstream sharers, for their work. Theoretically, as third-party ads against RSS feeds have raised concern, this move may as well, unless it is assumed that third-party ads against excerpted articles is within the gray area.


In addition to browsing the articles themselves, you can see downstream conversation around the original content - be that comments on Facebook, or tweets from your friends that contain the specific URL. You can engage in that conversation from Flipboard by replying to Twitter shares or adding your own comments to Facebook, but it isn't aiming to be yet another Twitter client, so a TweetDeck or Seesmic killer this is not.

With Flipboard's unveiling, this closes the door on Ellerdale outright. Their site is expected to be made end of life as soon as tomorrow.