The Real Deal on Flipboard and its use in Real Estate

Flipboard is a newly launched iPad application that I think will quickly change the way we consume information from sources like Facebook, Twitter and other update “feeds” of our choice.  The application basically creates a magazine style theme out of your Twitter and Facebook friends status updates, specific Twitter users or Twitter lists.  It then combines images, videos and any links that your friends post into a visually stunning layout that is easy to navigate and allows quick and easy sharing options back through Twitter and Facebook.

So now that we know what it is, we want to see it in action. But, for the few of us left in the world that don’t have an iPad, we’re stuck reading the reviews from the big tech blogs and the bloggers that get to beta test products.  But what about us average people?  You know, the people that these applications are actually built for…  Is Flipboard something that we will find useful?  Can it be used in Real Estate?  Is it really the “killer application” that will change the way we consume media?

Lets answer some of these questions, from an “average guy’s” perspective.

My initial thought as I open the app for the first time was “wow, it’s beautiful”.  It was displaying a random image from one of the stock Flipboard sections.  These sections, of which 9 are available, basically act as a table of contents for your Flipboard.

The first thing I did was delete the stock sections and begin adding my own.  You can choose from 25 or so pre-populated options (TED Talk videos, AllThingsD, and The Onion were my first 3 choices) and then begin adding other sections by doing a quick search.

As of today, the search only pulls from Twitter and Twitter lists. I hope they eventually add the ability to search Facebook Lists and Pages.

Next, I logged into my Facebook account and attempted to login to my Twitter account, but was met with some resistance (as of writing this, Flipboard is over capacity and you aren’t able to login to either of the social networks, but they’re working on installing new servers to handle the load).  At this point, I can only assume that the data pulled in from my two accounts will provide the same experience as the data I’m getting from the other sections I have chosen to view.  That experience is awesome to say the least.

Will this be useful?

We’ve been discussing some ideas around the M Realty office on how to stay ahead of the curve on the monitoring of our agents activities on the various social media platforms (mostly Twitter and Facebook) from a brokerage standpoint, and I think this could be a perfect tool for doing so.  Already, we can add a Twitter list that I created of all M Realty agents. If Flipboard adds the ability to view Facebook contact lists, we’ll be set.  Of course, we’re not trying to be “big brother brokerage” or anything, we just like to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to things like this and think it may become an issue in the future.

Other than that, I see Flipboard as a beautiful implementation of an aggregator pulling news from all my most trusted sources.  This, I love.  I’m not sure there will be any usefulness surrounding actual implementation in someone’s Real Estate business though.  We shall see…

My wish list:

I found myself wanting to create a new status update to share content. From what I can tell this is not currently an option.

It would awesome to add some sort of ability to cache pages for reading offline.

Somewhat related to the above, I would love to see the full articles instead of excerpts where you HAVE to view the rest of the story on the original web.

I’d love to be able to have more than 9 sections available in my table of contents.

Finally, as I mentioned above, I would LOVE the ability to pull from Facebook contact lists and Facebook Pages.

Incase you haven’t picked up on it by now, I pretty much love this application.  It IS the “killer application” that will be one of the main reasons I finally break down and purchase an iPad (along with all the other cool stuff we’ve been using it for at M Realty).

If you’ve had a chance to use Flipboard, what do you think of it so far?