Tech Tuesday - Flipboard

I have been using Flipboard since it was introduced for iPad, and it has completely changed the way I read news and articles. Increasingly I have been using the application to follow genealogy blogs and other sites of interest. If you have an iDevice (iPad, iPhone, iPod) or more recently an Android device, Flipboard is a must-have app.

After downloading the app from iTunes or an Android app store, create an account. This will enable your profile to be viewed across multiple devices. You can then add sites to your favorites (these are displayed as tiles). I have several genealogy-specific tiles. You can have a tile that is simply "tweets mentioning genealogy" and it will pull from the Twitter feed with the term #genealogy. This is great for reading articles without advertising or for following specific terms. I will add that Flipboard on the phone is a surprisingly easy app to use and read.

I added my own blog as a tile and it pulls from the rss feed, displaying articles and favorite blogs in an easy to read, magazine-style format.

Flipboard has also been an essential application in my professional field, helping to stay current with real-time news with tweets mentioning my organization and other events.

Flipboard has also added the ability to pull from Google+ and YouTube, in addition to earlier feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn. If you sign into YouTube through Flipboard, it will pull from your YouTube profile and display videos from your subscriptions.

*I don't have a financial interest in Flipboard and I am not paid to use their product. It is awesome though, and I highly recommend it to anyone.