Twitter was created as an open platform, an open communications ecosystem, and I hope it can stay that way. You have to be really careful not to let money get in the way of that.
What the iPad does is it opens people's minds to a new way of doing things. They're actually thirsting for it.
Let's say you go to a friend's wedding, or Thanksgiving, or Halloween. It'd be great the next day to see what went on with your friends' Thanksgiving weekend, or all the costumes they wore on Halloween, and be able to look back and see what they wore the year before, and the year before that.
I think the screen size chosen for the iPad is perfect for publishers to render content beautifully, for games to be played.
The Web as we've known it for a long time has been pages linking and pointing to other pages.
Twitter can be incredibly valuable as an open communications mechanism, but if you close too many things down too quickly, if you think about it too short-sightedly, you could easily do a lot of damage to that ecosystem.
Personalized news aggregators are geared around connecting you to news sources; we're about connecting you to your friends. To people you're inspired by. To people that you're following on Facebook and Twitter.
My dad died from cancer when I was 18, and my mom was in a really tough spot. So I wanted to try to help at home. I had started doing some technology consulting.
That's why we created Flipboard as a social magazine meant for an iPad, meant for a large touch-screen device. That idea of content presented beautifully, oriented around communities and special topics of interest, is really powerful.
Kind of like Google crawls the Web, we crawl the social networks. Where Google analyzes links and Web pages, we look at the same thing with people. So we can tell, for example, who you interact with more frequently. Or if it's not frequency, maybe it's consistency.
In high school, I started my first company, called M Cubed Software. We named it that because it was me and two other guys named Mike.
I.B.M. was my college education, effectively. They were very good at teaching you management.
Articles themselves are condensed to narrow columns of text across 5, 6, 7 pages, and ads that are really distracting for the reader, so it's not a pleasant experience to 'curl up' with a good website.
I had been reading magazines a lot, and I love magazines, and so I was always asking myself why is it that these gorgeous articles just don't translate well to the web? Presentation was one aspect of it.
Facebook is about seeing what your friend is doing. Twitter, you follow different people. Flipboard is about passions and interests and topics, and so it's the same social web that all of these products are letting you look at, but Flipboard is coming at it from a more topical point of view.
You don't feel like you have to interact with a whole bunch of people when you get on Flipboard. It's not a source of social anxiety.
My parents were entrepreneurs. They ran a small ad agency in upstate New York.
I was really excited by the idea that people were sharing information now and discovering information in a totally new way on the Internet via Twitter and Facebook, yet that experience was pretty clunk and just lots of bit.ly links.
Having run Tellme before, one of the things I learned about running a big network is it's one thing to have some people not be able to get on the way they want to get on, but as long as people who are on the network are having a good experience, you're totally cool.
Our whole goal is to basically feature publishers' content and get people to click over to that content on the website.
