VIDEO: Zumobi’s Ziibii brings a river of content to the iPhone

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Using a sort of digital river, the app, called Ziibii, graphically depicts these pockets of content as “rafts” that float across a user’s screen. (The name Ziibii was inspired by a Native American word for river.)

The app combines Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr content in one place, said John SanGiovanni, co-founder and VP of product design at Seattle-based Zumobi. In addition, users can add their favorite RSS feeds from blogs and news sites and have them appear in the river.

Tapping on a raft brings up the main article, blog or photo; Ziibii constantly caches information in the background so content is quickly accessible.

Less-adventuresome viewers can organize the content in lists. SanGiovanni said the company conducted focus groups and found people tended to use the river setting when they were in social situations, and use the list setting when using the app for business.

Zumobi is planning to use the application to bring brands and advertising agencies into the river, so to speak. The company recently teamed with computer maker Lenovo and advertising firm Ogilvy to offer an application built for the Beijing Olympics that gave smartphone users access to “conversational” information from the event, like athletes’ blogs, real-time photo feeds and medal counts. The company found that iPhone users were most likely to interact with the content, so Zumobi launched Ziibii first for the iPhone, SanGiovanni said.

The company plans to launch the application on what it calls “superphones” that use other OS platforms, including Android, Windows Mobile 6.0 and higher and certain BlackBerry Pearls, Curves and 88xx-series phones.