What is the Flipboard app and how do you use it on your mobile device

There may not be a sector in the consumer tech market that is growing as fast as social networking and social media. Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn and a ton of other sites are all more popular than they have ever been. These sorts of sites, which used to be populated only by teenagers and young professionals, are now being used by people who never envisioned themselves as someone who would use the Internet to any extent at all.

With the growing popularity of these social networking sites has also come a popularity in electronic tools that allow you to browse and use these sites faster and with much more ease. The invention of mobile devices like the iPad and a huge variety of different Android based tablets has made these social networks all the more popular.

Right along with the increased popularity of social networking and surfing the web using mobile devices was the increased need for a really good Really Simple Syndication (RSS) reader that could make it fun to browse those sites — and a ton of additional sites — without actually having to actually visit every site a person might be interested in.

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It seems like a no brainer that an RSS reader that was specially designed to take advantage of the great picture and vivid colors that devices such as the iPad offered was needed.

While many companies took a swing and a miss at revolutionizing the RSS reader market, the Flipboard app is widely regarded as the first application that actually hit the mark.

So what is the Flipboard app? The simple answer is that the application is little more than an RSS reader that is able to compile social network postings and put them into one specific place. 

In reality, the application is a combination of your social networking profiles and a more extensive RSS reader, smashed together and tied up with a pretty bow in the form of fantastic pictures and video. This conglomeration is put together in such a way that the application takes on the appearance of a massive digital magazine that is only populated with topics you find interesting.

When you first download the application (which is available for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android Operating System) you are taken to a setup screen that will allow you to set up a Flipboard account. Once you have created an account you can hand pick different topics that you are interested in and the application then populates itself with stories of the day from those topics.

The application then starts you off with some carefully curated sites that match the categories you have chosen, while also offering up the ability to add a huge number of different feeds later on. Where the app really earns the high praise it has gotten is the way it displays the RSS feed of these topics. The magazine approach really makes the application fetching to the eye because you aren’t just reading a steady stream of text.

The other way Flipboard stands out from the hundreds of other apps that act as RSS readers is because you can quickly and easily link an existing RSS reader account such as Google Reader, along with your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube and other accounts. You can read these separately, paging through them like sections of a book, or you can have the content simply inserted into the other stories seamlessly.

The app becomes so full of stories, and pictures and video that it would take weeks to go through all the content you can curate and read. The answer to the question of what is the Flipboard app ends up being that it is a multimedia presentation device that will blow you away with both its simplicity and detail rolled into one.