For a complete infographic addict, like me, this made my day. Thanks to Ashmi Dang (LinkedIn; @AshmiNYC on Twitter) for this one.

Infographics are kind of annoying. Sure, they pack a lot of information into a few words and figures, but they often leave you wanting more (and it doesn't help that they're impossible not to click on). ThinkBrilliant addresses this problem in themost logical way possible: with this super-meta infographics infographic. It uses the format we all love (and loathe) to explain why said format makes us feel so torn. So next time you're promised a lot of information with minimal reading involved, you'll understand why part of you just isn't buying it.

Out of the iPhone apps, I suggest checking out Precorder and PBS, as well as Time Shutter if you're a SF enthusiast.

All of the iPad apps look pretty cool, but I don't use TiVo and am not a graphic designer, so I'd say don't miss World of Goo and AirView (video below) is pretty incredible, especially for a free app.

This Week's Best Apps

In this week's thank-goodness-it's-the-end-of-the-week app roundup: Goo, sculpted; TiVo, controlled; places to eat, discovered; Twitter, relaxed; history, revisited; PBS, appreciated, and much, much more.

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iPad

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We are so crazy about apps right now you wouldn't believe it. If you have recommendations, tips, or just want to let us know about your own app, drop a note in the comments or shoot me an email.

The author of this post can be contacted at tips@gizmodo.com

Naif Al-Mutawa used his impressive knowledge of Islam and world history to create a truly universal comic series that helps children (and anyone who reads the series) basic ethics and what it means to be a hero in today's world. This is not religious or proselytizing; this is a valuable addition to world literature that will hopefully help our collective human society to reach across borders and cultures to gain respect and empowerment from each other, rather than fear and oppression. He does a great job of tying American comics back to their historical and religious roots as well. Well worth the watch.

I haven't gotten to try it yet, since I was told that their servers are over capacity, but even with the shortcomings that Scoble mentions, I love how this is going to change the way developers and users approach the filtering of the exponentially increasing amount of content we're consuming. As a visual person, this makes a lot of sense to me.

First look at “revolutionary” social news iPad app: Flipboard

July 20, 2010 By Robert Scoble View Comments

You’ve seen Twitter clients like TweetDeck or Seesmic, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news readers like NewsGator, Google Reader, or, even, newer ones for iPad like Pulse, but you’ve never seen one like this.
You’ve seen news aggregators like Techmeme, Google News, Skygrid, Yahoo News, Hacker News, or Huffington Post, but you’ve never seen one like this.

What is “this?” It’s Flipboard.

It’s from a new company you’ve never heard from before. Embedded here is an exclusive interview with CEO Mike McCue. You might have heard of Mike before. He sold a company, TellMe, to Microsoft for about $800 million dollars. Flipboard, the company, has already had one round of funding from Kleiner Perkins and today is announcing a new round of funding along with an acquisition of the Ellerdale Project (http://www.ellerdale.com/).>

What is Flipboard? It turns your Facebook and Twitter account into something that looks like a magazine. It also lets you build a custom magazine, either by choosing from Flipboard’s pre-built curated “boards” or by importing Twitter lists. This is a very powerful and engaging way to read Twitter. You can also turn a single person’s Twitter account, or a single brand’s Twitter account, into a Flipboard. For instance, you can follow Techcrunch on Twitter with it and it will turn Techcrunch into a beautiful magazine-like interface that’s easier to read than any other reader.

The differentiator for Flipboard is the design. Lots of touches that make it engaging:

1. Touch an article and it “zooms” to reveal more.
2. Touch a video and it plays inline.
3. Turn your iPad and everything reconfigures, even photos switch from vertical to horizontal formats.
4. Touch “read more on Web” on longer articles and instantly be transported to the original website that was the originator of the information discussed in the tweet.
5. When you bring in your Facebook friends your friends’ photos, status messages, will all be laid out in attractive pages.
6. You can touch to share, favorite, like, or retweet, depending on what you are reading.

To get a sense of how dramatically different Flipboard is from any other Facebook or Twitter client, you should watch the video we filmed with McCue where he demoed the app for our cameras. In the interview he covered the philosophy of this interesting new company, demoed the product for us, and talked about where the company is going.

So, why is this disruptive, or even, revolutionary? Revolutionary isn’t our word, either, but is what actor/entrepreneur Ashton Kutcher said when we showed him the app to get a feeling for how it would affect the content businesses he’s involved in. He’s not the only one, either. We showed it to Wolfram Alpha’s CEO, Barak Berkowitz and he said “it’s one of the most awesome iPad apps I’ve ever seen.”

Techcrunch has covered that in a second post about why Flipboard is a killer app that — on first look — appears very disruptive to Twitter client producers, news readers, and news aggregator/publishing companies. In that second article we’ve also laid out why Twitter and the iPad have set in place the ingredients for a real media revolution — one that goes way beyond other publishing systems and one that further moves our reading behavior away from RSS aggregators.

But here let’s discuss how it works.

You add in your Twitter and Facebook accounts. It builds tiles, or “sections” out of your accounts. If you are an advanced user you can add in other people’s Twitter accounts, Twitter lists, or choose from a pre-done set of custom boards to choose from. More on those in a minute.

You then click on the section it builds after you flip past a “cover” that is made from photos that it finds from your friends and people you’re following on Twitter. The cover itself is pretty interesting, but the meat is inside, so we’ll focus on that.

Click on “Facebook,” for instance, and you’ll see your friends’ photos, tweets, status messages, articles, and videos. Just drag your finger through page after page, er, board after board, of these things. This is your Facebook news feed, but in a way you’ve never seen it before — all laid out like a newspaper. Click on any item and you can see the originating status message and all comments. You can “like” the item, or comment on it too.

How did Flipboard find these things? After all, I have 1,800 friends on Facebook and am following 19,000 people on Twitter and it filters out most of the noise I see on other Twitter and Facebook readers. Well, it has a set of algorithms that are looking for highly engaged items. You know, items that have lots of comments, likes, or retweets. It also has an algorithm that senses photography that’s been linked to from Facebook status messages and it lays those photos out.

When you reopen Flipboard it re-paginates the whole set of boards (you can only display nine sections at a time, which is a major limitation of the first version, but more on limitations in a second.

Along the bottom is a timeline that you can run your finger across to see a menu of all items. If you get to the end of the timeline and want to see more, just flip the last board over and it will go and get more pages for you to view.