What a cool idea! Flipboard, which just came out as a free iPad app, takes a user’s social content (from Facebook, Twitter, etc) and essentially creates a dynamic magazine-like experience – on the iPad. Although I haven’t used it myself, the screenshots and videos sure make the experience look beautiful. It almost looks like I can touch and feel a digital magazine that has been created just for me – using content from my own social networks. Flipboard also aggregates content from other sources, and creates it’s own curated hubs of data.

I’ve noticed a lot of mixed reviews about Flipboard. Some are saying it’s amazing, beautiful, easy-to-use, where others are complaining about not being able to sync up their Facebook content or getting errors (i.e. “over capacity”)  when trying to access data. Some of these complaints sound like some technical issues that may need some ironing out – so, I’m hoping that things will smooth out over time. (Remember: software nowadays is created in an agile process: we are always in a Beta!!!)

What I do question, however, is the need for yet another content aggregator. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be so many of these out there that I can’t even keep track. Oh good: yet another tool to consolidate my YouTube videos and my Tweets? Do I really need this as an iPad app when I can get it easily through a website? It’s questions like these that make me see Flipboard is more about marketing hype and buzzwords (iPad, Social, big VC funding, etc) than it is about providing any useful tool for me. But, that is just my initial thoughts – I’d love to try it out as it looks pretty dang cool!