I predicted before the iPad came out that we would see within 6 months a flurry of totally new visualizations of Twitter. To me Flipboard is not a news app - it is a Twitter client, but one that has attacked a very specific niche (a very large one!) to visualise the news that people are sharing.

What is not being said - is actually how disruptive this App is going to be to the likes of TweetDeck / Seesmic, the fact is that a very large percentage of Twitter is sharing news and discussing it (I should know we collect 10 million+ links from Twitter each day). Although right now Flipboard only has a very simplistic commenting feature - I can see it grabbing hearts and minds enough that with a few more features to allow interaction with your Twitter feed that many mainstream users would not need to use a traditional Twitter client. Visualization is everything, when TweetDeck came out it revolutionised Twitter consumption for the power user, Flipboard for me is going to do the same for the mainstream user.

It does also need to solve the problem that Twitter Lists are not a perfect way to deliver categorized content, because not every Twitter user always shares stories on the same subject. In just a few minutes of usage I found family photos mixed in with Technology news. In this respect curation is king, and they will need to find better ways to filter out the irrelevant stuff and am sure their purchase of Ellerdale will go a way to help solving it.

Lastly, they are currently treading on very unsafe ground with how they are collecting and re-using content. They have stated that they are maintaining a local 'list' of sites which are not happy to share their full content. This makes the presumption that publishers would wish to give their content away for free, but the market has moved in the last few years and many publishers continue to struggle to find ways to monetize and are even more sensative to others taking and monetizing their content. Although they have clearly tried to distance themselves from this issue by going with the 'free' model, the App is going to become popular off the back of other peoples content, building an install base to me is still monetizing.

I am actually very happy that this is re-opening the discussion about fair-use and content licensing, because the industry as a whole does need a solution in which content can be distributed, because we live in a world where people want to read content from multiple vendors.