It was like watching a great dual between two champions. Using Twitter,  Nova Spivak (innovator, technologist of Twine fame) and Robert Scoble (noted techno-blogger with Rackspace) debated the merits of the new Flipboard app (see whole exchange here http://bagtheweb.com/b/JmL17n).

Now if you don’t know what a Flipboard is by now that means: a) you’re a normal human being with a life beyond Twitter b) you just came back from a six month hike in the remote regions of the Sahara desert or c) you’re too busy covering the work from your “on vacation” colleagues to care.

But just in case, basically (dare I use that word) Flipboard is an app that according to Gigaom is a, “ a beautiful application that reformats web articles, photos and status messages into a magazine-style layout. You can use it as an alternate way to consume your Twitter followers’ shared links, your Facebook friends’ posts and pictures, or other choice feeds of web content.”

Now this gushing pales by comparison to Scoble’s pre-launch tweet; “The world is about to change. iPad owners you will want to stay up late tonight. “Revolutionary,” All I could think when he assigned such grand promises for a simple app (oops – there I go again calling it basic or simple) was, “Boy – I hope he knows what he’s saying. That’s type of hype is worthy of Steve Jobs and Scoble is no Jobs (with all due respect)”.

After the launch, I started to see the conversation buzzing along; it was cool many proclaimed. It was positioned as the “world’s first social magazine”. Then, the conversation turned to discuss the finer points of the app. Nova Spivak wondered out loud (in Twitter he can “wonder out loud” given how many followers he has) whether the magazine format really was well suited to the real time-ness of many social media information. His point was that magazines are built for easy grazing; ill suited to manage the near real time information that is Twitter and Facebook.

Scoble, defending his POV (all very gentlemanly like), came back with: “You haven’t had time to judge these properly. I’ve put 70 hours into Flipboard and its WAY better than Pulse for reading.”

Let me stop you right now – I am not going to tell who I agree with. How would I know! I still have a 2G wireless phone for heaven’s sake. But as I watched these two clearly engaged men argue the merits of the app – all I could think was; “Did they lose their perspective on the real world of Judy Consumer?”

When Scoble declared a “new world” changing app was being launched – I admit – I stayed up. I wondered what kind of app could change the world. When I did learn what it was – I felt a bit gypped on behalf of Judy Consumer. Honest! This app did sound cool but it seemed more like a “new dress on sorta old content girlfriend” type of thing. I even get how this app is cool for heavy duty social networkers who live the majority of their lives in the digital realm. Nice surely – but world changer?

Then even as I struggled to understand why, in the first place, would anyone call this a “world changer”, I see a discussion between  Spivak and Scoble go down the technical rabbit hole discussing whether the Flipboard format was superior than other reader options for users with lots of information (like them). Apparently, they both seemed to agree that only some kind of eye tracking experiment would answer the question.

And as this whole pre-launch/ launch/ discussion played itself out over a few hours, all I could wonder was am I the only one struck by the lack of perspective around the launch of this app.

1) Yes – the app is cool but No – the app won’t save the world.

2) How come someone has to spend 70 hours studying it – that’s nearly two weeks studying one app! Is no one else surprised/ bothered and generally puzzled by this significant time investment in “just” an app.

3) Who really cares? While fun, this app does not even solve a real problem for Judy Consumer. Based on the descriptions and the debate, this app seems to be built for heavy duty social media content consumers (like Spivak and Scoble) and Judy Consumer does not fall into that category. She does not struggle with Twitter because she probably doesn’t use it much (Twitter has about 7% penetration – well below the tipping point of 15%). Nor is Facebook a challenge for her since women have taken to social networks in bigger numbers than men.  So does she need a better way to manage her social information? Probably not!

What struck me with this launch is how a nice, fun app managed to get blown out of proportion to what it really is. So here’s a suggestion to the techno-media crowd (you know who you are) – let’s reserve the “world is about to change” buzz for when it will really matters – like when someone invents an app to erase world hunger.

Until then … a little perspective please.

Judy Shapiro