OPEN

One thing that struck me of the first wave of publishers’ iPad apps was that while they were very pretty, the NewsRack RSS reader I downloaded trumped all of them for usefulness. The posts came with embedded videos and images, looked great and I could choose to share them to Delicious, email, Instapaper, Twitter and Facebook among others.

Pulse soon followed as an interesting play, presenting stories from different sources as a beautiful stream of images (and caught flak from the New York Times, which accused it of misusing its content).

Now we’re presented with Flipboard, a ‘”stealth” social magazine’ according to the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

I’ll certainly be downloading it to try out (it’s free on iTunes). With backers like Jack Dorsey and Kleiner Perkins it looks like a serious contender as a new format for tablet computers….