Just a few reasons why I love Flipboard and Instagram

For the last few months I find myself increasingly fascinated by Flipboard and can easily spend a couple of hours creating my ‘personalised’ magazines, then enjoying reading them whenever I have time to spare.

Pic- Courtesy Google

While the world's first social magazine app has been turning heads for a few years now, what is new is that this popular e-zine reader for iPad is now available on the iPhone as well. The same great look and feel of Flipboard isn't sacrificed at all on the smaller screen.

With the mission statement clearly defining what they are about, ‘Our mission is to let people discover and share content in beautiful, simple, and meaningful ways.”Headed by Mike McCue, former CEO of Tellme, and Evan Doll, former senior iPhone engineer at Apple, they have succeeded in providing hours of interactive and most importantly, ‘free’ reading pleasure for millions worldwide.

What I really like about Flipboard is that one can flip content into it from any web site--which is a must-have feature--on a computer. That makes it easy to author blog entries, web pages then flip then into an e-zine of your own creation, such as one for work. Thereafter, you really don't have to worry much about creating a visually appealing layout since it's done for you.You can also choose to tweet content as you "flip" into an existing e-zine, so that's a neat feature.

Flipboard is truly on a quest to transform how people discover, view and share content by combining the beauty and ease of print with the power of social media. It was on Flipboard that I recently discovered that Steven Meisel did not shoot Vogue’s latest fashion spread. There were no backlights, no beauty dish.

Instead, the austere fashion publication took to Instagram for a special Fashion Week photo shoot. With that Vogue has created a very interesting and fun act for all others to follow and if they try hard enough, better them in the act.

“I thought this time around during Fashion Week in New York we could try doing a shoot that shows clothes you can buy in stores right now,” explained Sally Singer, creative digital director at Vogue. Vogue then posted the shoot, calling it 'VogueInstaFashion' on its website.

The spread features top model Hillary Rhoda in scenes all over New York City - Times Square, Central Park - all shot with just an iPhone by photographer Michael O'Neal.

According to Singer, Andrew Gold from Vogue’s photography department had been following O’Neal’s work on Instagram and thought he would be great for this project.

As far as I'm concerned, it is clear, more than ever before, the power of social media is growing every hour of every day and since I’m a strong believer in Instagram, this just proved it how influential really Instagram is.

(NB This piece is a part of my column 'My Take' originally featured in Muscat Daily.)