If you are reading tech blogs, you probably have already seen Flipboard mentioned on a few of them. Dubbed “your personal magazine”, Flipboard has become a Top 10 app in the US iTunes store.

Flipboard turns your Facebook and Twitter networks into a magazine-like news stream. The design is amazing, and you will be surprised how beautifully your social network turns into a glossy paper. One of the outstanding things about Flipboard is its ability to take plain-text tweets or Facebook updates and combine with them with referenced photos or websites. This means that instead of reading a friend’s Tweet saying “I’m at Joe’s Pub”, Flipboard will already show the photo of the beer mug your friend posted to yfrog. Showing off never looked so good.

Flipboard’s interface is that of a magazine:

• Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
• Touch a video to play it inline.
• Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
• When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
• Share, favorite, like, or retweet what you are reading.

There are a few obvious drawbacks. All information seems to go through Flipboard’s servers, which are often overloaded. If that is the case, your Facebook and Twitter streams can’t be displayed. Unfortunately, that happens quite a lot, especially in the evenings of US time. I’m sure the company behind Flipboard, backed by experienced management and investors, will get a handle of this, but meanwhile it does hurt usability.

Despite this, I found Flipboard quite addictive and turn to it to check my social stream frequently – even if I just checked with Twitterific or looked at Facebook on the browser. The app certainly looks indicative of a future which organizes news around your social networks.

And you can’t beat the fact that your own social magazine is free [iTunes].

Related posts:

1. Twitterific Is Terrific
2. Sobees for Facebook: Turn Facebook Into Your Personal Newspaper
3. Publisher Wars: Six Free Newspaper Apps for iPad Reviewed
4. Review: Photogene for iPad
5. What Is the Best Google Reader App on the iPad?