Now you can browse the social web in style

New York:

A new iPad application makes Twitter and Facebook feeds a whole lot prettier. Flipboard, a start-up that is unveiling its iPad app on Wednesday, builds a personalised magazine full of updates, photos and articles shared by a reader's friends or by people they choose to follow on Twitter and Facebook. Soon it plans to incorporate material from other sources, like Flickr, Foursquare, Yelp and perhaps e-mail messages and attachments.

"It's something print figured out years ago, how to visually declutter," said Mike McCue, chief executive of Flipboard who founded the company with Evan Doll, a former iPhone engineer at Apple.

Flipboard begins to imagine an entirely new way of accessing the social Web.

When people visit Facebook or Twitter today, they see a long list of status updates, often with shortened links on Twitter or a thumbnail photograph on Facebook. Twitter in Particular has never been especially aesthetically pleasing and its founders have spoken about the need to make it more accessible and easier to navigate.

Flipboard arranges status updates so they look like pull quotes and it prominently displays photographs. Instead of a link to an article, Flipboard shows its first few paragraph. People can comment, just like they can on the social network, and if they want to dig deeper into an article or a user's account, they connect to that Web page.

"Honestly, you cannot read all the data coming at you, so we make selections," McCue said. To help make those selections, Flipboard also announced that it acquired a start-up called Ellerdale that analyses and filters real-time data streams. Arthur van Hoff, Ellerdale's co-founder, will become Flipboard's chief technology officer.

Eventually, Flipboard will also have advertisements that are reminiscent of print, McCue said. A reader flipping through Flipboard on an iPad might see a full-page ad, which McCue said he hopes will be less intrusive and more effective than ads on Web pages, where they compete with content for space. Flipboard also plans to make money by offering certain content in exchange for micropayments or subscriptions and sharing the revenue with the publisher.

McCue has a track record of merging the latest technologies with old-fashioned ones. Before he applied ideas from the print world to Twitter and the iPad with Flipboard, he founded Tellme, which delivers Web data over a 1-800 number dialled on the telephone. Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007, reportedly for $800 million.

Flipboard also announced Wednesday that it has raised $10.5 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Index Partners and angel investors including Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter.