Flipboard for iPad: Servers Overwhelmed by Positive Buzz

What happens when your formerly unknown company and iPad product gets rave reviews by a super social networking tech pundit like Robert Scoble and deep coverage by widely read tech reporter Kara Swisher? Robert Scoble/Scobelizer: First look at "revolutionary" social news iPad app: Flipboard Kara Swisher/All Things Digital: Meet Flipboard: Mike McCue Talks About Stealth "Social Magazine" Start-Up That Just Nabbed $10.5 Million in Funding The first thing that happens is your iPad app leaps to number 1 in the iTunes iPad free apps list. The second thing that happens is your servers creaks, groans, and eventually breaks under the virtual pressure of tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of iPad users try to configure their new app on your servers. That's what happened to Flipboard when it was released yesterday. Flipboard Attempts to configure the app the read my personal streams from Facebook and Twitter initially resulted in generic looking error messages. Within hours this changed to a more targeted error message acknowledging their servers were being crushed from the waves of iPad users attempting to access them. Fortunately, Flipboard provides numerous predefined (and non personalized) Twitter list feeds to choose from and use. I found the experience of having photos and links from tweets expanded to full views in nicely formatted pages to be a good one. In the wee hours of this fine Thursday morning, I still can't configure Flipboard to work with my personal Facebook and Twitter feeds. However, I like the overall experience enough to try to be patient and wait for their system and network administrators to stabilize their service. Flipboard designers still have a couple of things to tweak after full sevice is reestablished, however. The TED Talks page is one example. Only the main (largest) pane item has a title associated with it. So, unless you recognize something (usually a human) in the other panes, you have no way of knowing what the other video presentations are about. These kinds of issues are relatively minor, however, and should be easy to tweak.

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Flipboard for iPad: Servers Overwhelmed by Positive Buzz

Todd Ogasawara

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Todd Ogasawara