*Okay, so it's a publishing platform. That is social media. Sorta. So naturally Flipboard is promoted through vernacular video.
*But check out the horrid little impossible augments in that video. The part where his "friends" are standing there, "flipping" content at him and his iPad... There needs to be a word for acts of metaphorical video like that. Where you make a situation supposedly clear by using special FX to film something physically impossible.
*Help me out here, film school grads.
*via @ some guy on my social network who was standing there dressed like a hipster and reached out into midair and threw content at me.
*More: people are arguing that Flipboard here militates against the publication of for-profit "magazines" on the iPad, because Flipboard is sorta structured like a magazine, only it's socially-generated. And, of course, Flipboard is machine designed, because no print designer, fontographer or layout guy ever got near that thing.
*I would counter that what this thing really massacres is weblogs. Flipbook makes weblogs look archaic, much more than it makes magazines look archaic. Because a "magazine" could just be a curated Flipbook, whereas, the current mechanism of displaying and accessing blogs looks quite clunky compared to this system... very 80-column green screen. Very MySpace.
http://www.subtraction.com/2010/10/27/my-ipad-magazine-stand
*A critic here is more-or-less asking, 'well, since magazines no longer exist and don't work on the iPad anyway, where did the money go.' You hear that a lot these days. Sociality ate it, and the business model went away. If you could just get labor unions to design and maintain something like Facebook, then sociality would eat the works, and the Internet as a business wouldn't even exist. It would be like some wildebeest return to the status quo before the dotcom era. A Great Migration. The noncommercial Internet steals back and covers all, like grass through foreclosed and deserted suburbs.
*I wonder how long it will take Flipboard to realize that people don't want to read content generated by their own social network. Because obviously it would make vastly more sense to read the content generated by someone else's social network, some aspirational figure whom you aspire to become, like, say, Steve Jobs or Lady Gaga.
*Why not send me her Flipboard? Why not sell me that? By subscription. Then it's magazines all over again. What fun! Of course, you destabilized the publishing industry totally and put everybody out of work, but what the heck, they were just hanging out mooching on Facebook and Freecycle anyway... Think of it as a giant and involuntary retraining class.
*People still imagine that sociality is sticky, that it works on us because it's a group of our friends, but it isn't. Sociality is a stream of input from a group of entities who may or may not be our friends. A thing like that is completely malleable, just like an MP3 stream: it's mashable, pirateable, copiable, parametricizeable... All that classic stuff. You can build a flipboard out of it, and then build a flipboard out of the flipboards.
*Whip out some Javascript, turn the pieces loosely joined into a "platform," and then build more platforms onto the platforms. It's very like financial engineering for good-old-fashioned money, only, hey, wow, whoops, we overlooked something, and there's like a great, empty, throbbing hole in the core there.... and everybody's broke, and looking around for what to do next. Better open my platform here, and have a look at my friends.
*What interesting times these are. Dark euphoria!
