Flipboard offers a content-focused view of social media

Everyone’s talking about Flipboard, the magazine/social media hybrid for the iPad. It looks like this really could point the way forward for consumption of social media, and also be the iPad’s first real killer application.

For me the real story is that it flips (sorry) the social media thing on its head, from a view that’s focused on the people in your network into a view that prioritises the content that those people produce or link to.

That’s a big deal.

Why? Because that’s what social media is all about. Most of the time we’re interested in what the people we connect to have to say, and the content around the web that they recommend.

In other words, the use case for social media is not ‘I wonder what my friends are doing today’ but ‘I wonder what my social graph has got for me to look at’. In this scenario content comes first, not the content creator.

This might seem counter-intuitive in the  social media environment, which is driven by connections. But think about it – your Facebook and Twitter accounts are actually forms of information and entertainment (I need to credit my friend Matt Woods for that insight).

If your close friends really need to communicate with you there are better ways – phone calls and face-to-face being the most obvious. With social media we get a chance to hear what people are thinking, feeling, liking and hating. And that’s content.

The reason that social media is so effective is that some of that content is personally relevant in ways that mass media can’t be, such as your work colleague’s new baby pictures, or news of a friend’s holiday. Plus the media content that’s shared comes with personal endorsement and recommendations from people you trust, ie your network and social graph.

Flipboard takes your uniform stream of Twitter tweets and Facebook updates and applies traditional media hierarchies, prioritising stories that have high engagement and making it easier to see the important stories.

This is particularly useful in Twitter, where shortlink URLs to content  make it unclear where you’re likely to end up. Twitter has for so long been useful and innovative that we’ve got used to overlooking some of its most obvious user experience problems. Flipboard fixes many of them in one fell swoop.

There are still problems with Flipboard – the algorithms need to improve and display problems create niggles – but it’s clear that this is a game-changer.

And this is just the start. Soon we’ll look back on the way we consumed social media and wonder how we coped pre-Flipboard.

‘Society is held together by communication and information.’ So said Samuel Johnson back in the 18th Century.

Here in the 21st Century Johnson’s words are even more apt. New online social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed are merging information and communication through simple and easy-to-use interfaces.

Communication: Through Twitter and Facebook you can converse with other users quickly and easily through walls, news feeds, @replies and direct messages. Users have embraced the ‘less is more’ ethos and found that brevity aids communication. Recent research suggests that tools like Twitter and Facebook are now more popular than email as a means of communication.

Information: Social media provides users with instantaneous information about what’s going on in the world, indeed quicker than through any other medium. No wonder many people who previously used news websites, RSS feed readers and other content aggregators to track information online are now often using just Twitter instead. This has been given even more traction through the emerging power of real-time search.

But how are we to cope with the massive increase in information and communication?  Back in May 2008 ReadWriteWeb complained of too many choices and too much content – a year later and the situation’s worse than ever.

The past few months have seen Twitter’s traffic take-off but already we’re seeing complaints of Twitter fatigue.

We are experiencing the white heat of change in communication and information, and it’s not just technology but society itself that is changing. Just as Samuel Johnson would have predicted back in the 1770s.

Some reactions to the new version of Facebook, March 2009.

Things aren’t looking good for Facebook right now. The new changes have had some pretty fierce negative reactions. Take a look at the comments on the Facebook blog for a sampling of the current mood amongst Facebook users.

Of course negative comments to change are often far from being representative. Whenever a social platform makes significant changes it always kicks off a wave of negative reaction, and then usually settles down into calm acceptance. This was certainly the case with the last Facebook update in 2008.

However, this time it’s different. As many commentators have noticed, these changes are pretty obviously a response to Twitter’s recent phenomenal growth. This is the first time we’ve seen Facebook on the defensive, the first time that Facebook has been reactive rather than proactive. And that’s not a good sign.

Facebook still has a huge edge over Twitter – some estimates suggest over 120 million users worldwide. No-one knows Twitter’s global audience yet, but with 7 million in the US it’s likely to be less than 10 million globally.

Nevertheless Twitter is growing fast, and the balance of power has a habit of changing rapidly in the social networking space. As Steve Rubel has pointed out, historically only a few community sites have had any staying power.

Whether this is the beginning of the end for Facebook is too early to say, but we can be sure that the social networking space is going to look very different at the end of 2009 to how it did at the start.

We’re not yet a quarter of the way into 2009 but already it’s clear that, if 2008 was Facebook‘s year, 2009 is Twitter‘s.

In January 2009 Twitter saw a 10-fold traffic increase in the UK over the previous year, and this was before Jonathan Ross announced it on his Friday night show and Phillip Schofield talked about it on GMTV.

In the US the social media phenomenon has just hit the mainstream, as Jon Stewart’s piece on the Daily Show demonstrates (see video below) and the same is happening here in the UK.