Flipboard Adds Google Reader, Flickr and More
Context & Ripple Effects
Flipboard spent 2010 establishing itself as the iPad's 'social magazine,' and this update wires two of the era's largest open-content stores — Google Reader and Flickr — directly into its page-flip format. It lands against the backdrop of Google's own effort to keep Reader competitive, including its flurry of reader features back in August 2009; now the same feed corpus gets a second, third-party surface built entirely around visual curation.
First-order effects
- Google Reader subscribers gain a magazine-style way to read their feeds on the iPad inside Flipboard, and Flickr photo streams get the same treatment — neither service has to build that interface itself.
- Google now sits on both sides of the relationship: Reader remains a standalone feed reader competing for attention while simultaneously supplying Flipboard's content through its APIs.
Second-order effects
- Competing reading apps face pressure to match multi-service aggregation rather than single-feed display, since Flipboard's differentiation is repackaging others' streams — Scobleizer's verdict that the release is 'not the one I'm waiting for' signals user appetite for even broader source coverage.
- Services with open APIs become acquisition targets for aggregators' roadmaps, shifting distribution leverage toward whichever app owns the reading surface rather than whoever hosts the content.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer reading consolidates into curation layers stacked on top of open feeds and photo APIs, weakening destination-site loyalty and making API access and terms a strategic lever for suppliers like Google — a dependence Flipboard is choosing deliberately by integrating Reader.
The trend: News and photo consumption is shifting from single-purpose feed readers toward visual magazine-style aggregators that repackage many services' streams behind one interface.