Social networks are largely a huge waste of time. The time spent actually “networking” on them is minuscule next to the amount of time we spend just tooling around looking at people’s pictures, reading their funny posts and generally trying to compare our lives to our old classmates to see how we stack up. Well, if you’re going to waste time, you might as well do it in style! Enter FlipBoard.

FlipBoard is a digital magazine for your iPad that collates all of your social networks like Facebook and Twitter into a digital publication that you can flip through and explore. It uses an algorithm to cull the most popular stuff out of those streams and presents them in a beautiful magazine-like array. You can find text, pictures, even content that’s linked to by people on Twitter and Facebook. You can browse the content and reply to status updates on FB and Twitter right from the app.

In addition to social sites, there are also custom built channels that you can enable to see content from tech sites, art news, hard news and more. I foresee an array of channels created by content curators. There are already some channels created by Robert Scoble for instance. These channels don’t work off of RSS, so it’s not a feed reader, instead it crawls the web and travels down “important” links, presenting the content to you live in the app.

I’ve been playing with FlipBook for a while now and I’m really enjoying it. If you’re one of the rare birds that’s using social networks for actual networking, FlipBoard probably isn’t for you. If you’re a periodic time-waster like the rest of us, it’s definitely worth a look. I’ll leave you with this video of FlipBoard in action:

FlipBoard is available free on iTunes.

[uquery]http://www.uquery.com/apps/358801284-flipboard[/uquery]