It would appear they are doing some server side magic to determine which stuff shows up (hence the need for their own server):

"...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."

Quoted from: http://scobleizer.com/2010/07/20/exclusive-first-look-at-rev...

That makes sense, but I'd like to see some more transparent feedback with regards to my privacy then.

Something like: "We need to send your Twitter/Facebook stream to our servers to work our magic and present you only the signal instead of the noise"

Finally tripped across their privacy policy and terms of use: http://www.flipboard.com/privacy http://www.flipboard.com/terms

They may use personally identifiable information to send "marketing or promotional materials," so perhaps that's how they plan to make money.

I finally got the facebook part to work and they ask for every privilege you could imagine, including "access your info when you are not using the app". Too bad.

A friend of mine did something kinda similar. They might be somehow scraping/processing the twitter/facebook links. Ends up being pretty processor intensive.