One thing that struck me of the first wave of publishers' iPad apps was that while they were very pretty, the NewsRack RSS reader I downloaded trumped all of them for usefulness. The posts came with embedded videos and images, looked great and I could choose to share them to Delicious, email, Instapaper, Twitter and Facebook among others.

Pulse soon followed as an interesting play, presenting stories from different sources as a beautiful stream of images (and caught flak from the New York Times, which accused it of misusing its content).

Now we're presented with Flipboard, a '"stealth" social magazine' according to the Wall Street Journal's Kara Swisher.

Essentially, Flipboard pulls information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook data streams and then reassembles it in an easy-to-navigate, personalized format in a mobile tablet touchscreen environment.

In this social magazine, there are pull quotes, photos, videos, status updates and even the first paragraphs of content linked out to. There is also the ability to comment and share, as if one were on Twitter or Facebook.

I'll certainly be downloading it to try out (it's free on iTunes). With backers like Jack Dorsey and Kleiner Perkins it looks like a serious contender as a new format for tablet computers....

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey discusses the three core lessons learned from building and launching the world of 140 characters. So what did Jack take away from the experience? Successfully launching ideas requires 1) Getting your ideas out of your noggin 2) Luck with a dash of planning 3) Refining your idea based on feedback.

If Facebook started today, they would take where the web is today into account. The default would be public rather than private. And this is why they changed defaults from private to public since they want service to remain relevant. Mark added that it was not an easy move – from a technical or a user perspective – to change a service with 300 million users on such a core dimension.

Interesting take (above quote and linked post) on Facebook's shift to making public the default setting for Facebook users: that if it were setting up today then public by default would be how it did things.

On one level - of technical and service innovation and staying on the cutting edge - this view is absolutely correct. However, Facebook is not a new entrant to the social networking market, it comes with 300 million or more users to whom it has a duty of care to.

Whilst its most Twitter-literate, Foursquare-using, smartphone-toting users require public-first, or at least are used to open as their default setting on their web lives, the majority of its users are still uneasy or easily confused about privacy issues - from the practicalities of settings on the service, to the implications of their personal content and data being available on the open web.

The better, more responsible move for Facebook would be to be private as the default setting, easier settings for users and more effort put into educating users about the options available to them.