Category Archives: Flipboard

Fast, Efficient & Full-Context Retweeting with Flipboard

Posted on by

Much of my use of Twitter is to tweet links to articles. Frequently when people tweet links to articles, the actual title of the article is not mentioned, only the person’s comment about the article. This is certainly fine and useful, but when I go to compose my own retweet, I like to see the original title of the article also, because I may judge it to be of interest to my followers. So I often combine the tweet text and the original title in my retweet. The great beauty of Flipboard is that it makes it easy to work in this way — The article itself is seamlessly connected to the tweet, right on one screen. I think of this as seeing the tweet in its “full context.”

Unfortunately, Flipboard does not provide a space to work with the tweet text and the article title together. So I combine the “Reteet with Comment” button with the “Email Link” button to send the text of both to my email, and compose a retweet from there. I’ve made a set of Flickr slides that show this process. It might look complicated, but with the smooth iPad multitouch interface, the process only takes 15-20 seconds. The illustration below is a brief composite of the slides showing the process. To see all slides, click the illustration below, or go here.

Here’s the text that’s in red in the composite slide above:

At this point, you can do one of two things – You can retweet directly, by tapping “Send.” Or, what I usually do, you can copy the text of the tweet, and send it to yourself via Email, along with the full title information for the linked article. To do that, tap the copy button, then close the white box, by tapping outside it. (If you get a “Clear Message?” box, tap OK)

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter@ericrumseytemp

 

Official Twitter Retweets are not in Twitter Search or Lists

Posted on by

Since Twitter launched the Official Twitter Retweet (OTRT) in 2009, there has been much talk of its pros and many cons. I won’t go into all of the issues involved here. Instead, I’ll discuss a couple of the problems of the OTRT that I think are often not considered, but have important implications for all Twitter users.

The first is that OTRT’s do not appear in Twitter Search. This is easy to see, by doing what I’ve done in the accompanying screenshots – Find a tweet in your timeline that’s been retweeted using the official Twitter retweet, as indicated by the gray arrow icon, as in the screenshot. Then do a Twitter search for some words in the tweet. As shown in the lower screenshot here, the original tweet is retrieved by the search, but eBookNoir’s retweet, in the example, is not.

The fact that OTRT’s do not show up in Twitter searches has particularly timely implications, because of the new feature that Twitter just launched, the ability to search people you follow. If you follow a lot of people with a wide variety of interests, this is invaluable because it makes it easy to find out which ones are tweeting on a specific subject. But unfortunately, if people retweet with the OTRT, they won’t show up in the search.

In addition to Twitter Search not including OTRT’s, Twitter Lists also don’t show them. Twitter Lists are an excellent way to keep track of people tweeting on a particular subject. They have become especially popular and useful in the Flipboard app, so it’s unfortunate that OTRT’s are not shown in Twitter lists.

So, OTRT’s are not found in Twitter searches or Twitter lists. Where can they be found? – On your Twitter home page timeline (of your followers’ tweets) and in the tweets of individual people that you follow. Also, interestingly, in Topsy – Oddly, this third-party Twitter search tool includes OTRT’s in its searches, even though Twitter itself does not.

The basic reason that OTRT’s don’t show up in Twitter Searches or Lists is that they actually are not considered individual tweets, and consequently do not have a separate page. In a sense, they’re considered to be more of a “favorite” than a true retweet. So be aware – If you want your tweets to be in the Library of Congress’s archive of tweets, avoid using the Official Twitter Retweet!

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter@ericrumseytemp

 

Flipboard + iPad + Twitter: A Match Made in Heaven

Posted on by

The essence of Flipboard is well-captured in the headline of the press-release when it was launched in July 2010:

Inspired by the beauty of print and designed for iPad, Flipboard transforms the social media experience

With many rave reviews when it came out, Flipboard was chosen by Apple as the best iPad app of 2010, and selected by Time magazine as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010 (along with the iPad). Much of the commentary on Flipboard has focused on its transformative effect on Twitter, and that’s what I’ll focus on in this article.

Flipboard: “Twitter Cleaner-Upper”

As @alex says in an early review, Flipboard takes the raw, text-based Twitter stream, filters out the chatty, “what I had for breakfast” tweets, and presents the user with an elegant, graphic screen of news and articles that are linked in tweets. On the same theme, Mark Wilson calls Flipboard the Twitter cleaner-upper, because it “transforms any confusing stream of Twitter … posts into a dynamically generated digital newspaper.”

The shrunken screen shot at left has my tweets as they appear in Twitter on top, and the corresponding tweets in Flipboard below (click image for large view). The headlines and the text in the Flipboard entries are from the articles themselves — When one of these is clicked, the whole article appears. The tweet also appears at the bottom of the screen, from where it can be retweeted or replied to.

I should mention that most of my tweets contain links, as do all the ones in the screenshot, so this doesn’t show Flipboard’s filtering out of non-linking tweets, which, as the reviewers above emphasize, is one of its best features.

Before Flipboard, Twitter Lists never really took off — With Twitter, exploring a new List can be fairly imposing, especially because of the raw, unfiltered chatty tweets of many unknown Twitter users. In Flipboard, though, Twitter Lists come into their own — By turning the raw Twitter feed into a graphic, filtered screen of newsworthy articles, Flipboard makes it much faster to explore a new List to see if it’s worth reading.

The Elegance of the Experience: “A Ballet-Like Flow”

The screenshot and brief description above give only a rough idea of how transforming Flipboard is. It’s hard to convey in words what makes it so appealing — I suspect it’s that it does such a good job of capturing the touchy-feely, animated potential of the iPad. Without a doubt, this makes it fun to use, but it also makes it a much faster and more efficient way to browse through tweets than can be done in Twitter and other non-graphic clients.

One of the specific parts of Flipboard that shines is the smooth, fluid “sliding panel” transition that pulls the reader from the initial, abbreviated view of an article into the full view. The sliding panels metaphor is more fully implemented in the Twitter iPad app, but I like the fluid sliding effect in Flipboard better.

PC Magazine reviewer Jill Duffy’s poetic words are the best description I’ve found of the Flipboard feel:

A Ballet-Like Flow, Flipping, Scanning, Touching … Graceful with Rhythm

Is this enough to convey the idea? — Get your hands on an iPad, and let your fingers experience Flipboard!

Flipboard & Twitter – “This is the Next Step”

Another quote from @alex about the Flipboard-Twitter effect:

I truly believe that anyone who finds … Twitter to be dull, or unusable, will find [it] to be 100% more engaging on Flipboard. This is the next step.

Steve Jobs felt similarly — As reported by Robert Scoble, he wasn’t a big fan of Twitter, but he loved Flipboard.

I shy away from the term “killer app,” but it’s hard to avoid with Flipboard — I’ve had an iPad for three months. I thought when I got it that I’d spend much time exploring all the great apps I’ve long been reading about. But instead, I’ve spent most of my iPad time on (free!) Flipboard – By itself, it justifies the price of the iPad — Is that a killer app?

About the title of this article — As I was writing, and thinking about a title, I tweeted this phrase I came across in another article: “FlipBoard & iPad were a Match Made in Heaven.” I was flattered when Flipboard CEO and Co-inventor Mike McCue (@mmccue) favorited the tweet — Aha! — There was my title!

Eric Rumsey is at: eric-rumseytemp AttSign uiowa dott edu and on Twitter@ericrumseytemp

//