Flipboard for grandparents

December 29, 2012 8:31 PM

Flipboard for grandparents: Is there a simple way for my grandparents to browse multiple social media feeds on their new iPad?

I'm setting up a new iPad for my grandparents. They do not use any social media sites, and have no interest in starting. My parents, aunt, and uncle all use Facebook. My sister and cousins use Twitter, Instagram, Flickr, and more. Is there a simple way for Grandma to browse all the family's public feeds in one place? Something like Flipboard would be perfect, if it let them subscribe to individual social media feeds without joining each service. Is there an application that does this? A workaround for Flipboard?

posted by ecmendenhall to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I was going to say Hootsuite, but I think you have to sign up for each SNS service.
posted by KokuRyu at 8:41 PM on December 29, 2012

No advice about browsing consolidation, but they'd have to join Facebook/Instagram/etc. and be friends with their relatives to see their posts. Make sure the username and password are the same (or very similar, with a variable part based on the service being used) across the board, and friend everyone on all the services before handing over the iPad. I did that last year on a laptop for my grandfather's 80th birthday, and he loves it.
posted by halogen at 8:56 PM on December 29, 2012

I think you could quickly and easily set up dummy SNS accounts to feed content into and aggregate using Flipboard. I do this all the time for our clients.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:25 PM on December 29, 2012

I believe you can subscribe to RSS feeds from flipboard, which might help
posted by motorcycles are jets at 6:32 AM on December 30, 2012

This is the sort of thing IFTTT.com is often handy for. You could maybe save things to a Dropbox account? There are a ton of clever recipes once you join.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:56 AM on December 30, 2012