What do you get when you combine history’s most famous source of photography from around the world, with the hottest media consumption app on the hottest media consumption technology platform in years? With today’s addition of National Geographic to last year’s iPad App of Year, Flipboard, we will soon find out.
Filpboard works with many different publishers to display their content in its striking interface. The core of the Flipboard experience, though, remains media items from a user’s own social stream. Its margins are made up of things like well-crafted Twitter lists or Google Reader folders set up to deliver cross-publisher real-time “magazines” unlike anything the traditional magazine world has ever been able to deliver. If you could look at anything on Flipboard – would you want to look at National Geographic? Is National Geographic still awesome enough to blow our minds, even in Flipboard on an iPad, when the whole web is at our fingertips? I think it is.
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I love using Flipboard, as many people do, and I especially like using it to read Twitter lists like my MobileUXPros list or StreamingMusicIndustryStaff. But all the topical aggregation in the world can’t top truly great original content produced by professional specialists with fire in their bellies.
Below, a photo in National Geographic’s Flipboard section of a family of gorillas mourning the death of a baby gorilla in the Virunga National Park in the Congo. Top that, Instagram.
How does incredible photography like this get paid for in a digital world? There aren’t any ads in the free Flipboard app yet, so I really am not sure. I am worried about that. But from a pure user experience perspective: the new social web unearths some pretty great stuff, but good old National Geographic sure has retained its ability to move me. How about you?
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