Image Credit: Flipboard
Popular digital magazine app Flipboard today is rolling out perhaps the biggest revamp of the service since its initial launch, which features improved navigation, new ways to discover content, a daily news feature, revised smartphone design, and more.
Above: A screenshot of Flipboard’s new Topic Picker via the updated iPhone app.
Image Credit: Flipboard
The at the heart of “Flipboard 3.0″ is deep integration of technology from Zite, the mobile news recommendation service Flipboard acquired from CNN back in March. Zite is known for being able to recommend a large selection of fresh content about both broad and specific categories. Today’s Flipboard update adapts that intelligent recommendation technology in the form of 34,000 topics users can now follow.
In particular, I noticed that Zite’s technology really does an awesome job of helping you discover great user-created digital magazines on Flipboard. That’s significant because user-created Flipboard magazines have been around for a while now, but I’m guessing a lot of people weren’t motivated to discover or follow good ones. (The idea of sifting through a stranger’s curated digital magazines sounds about as fun as reading a collection of persuasive essays written by community college students. There are some gems, but you have to sift through tons of dull/uninspired essays before finding them.)
“We didn’t want discovering [user-created] magazines to be a chore,” said Flipboard cofounder and CEO Mike McCue in an interview with VentureBeat.
The updated Flipboard addresses the problem of finding the best digital magazines by first asking you to select a handful of topics you’re interested in. When you start reading content based on a particular topic, Flipboard will then suggest other topics to follow and related magazines worth checking out as you flip through digital pages. The idea, McCue told me, is to slowly refine how Flipboard delivers and recommends content by occasionally prompting you to follow or favorite the stuff you enjoy.
Above: One of the over 10,000 digital magazines created by Flipboard users.
Image Credit: Flipboard
Some of the user-created magazines I discovered made use of rich media to standout from what you’d expect from a digital magazine. For instance, there’s a magazine created by McCue and another person on Flipboard’s team with the sole purpose of sharing new songs you may enjoy. And because Flipboard supports embedded media, you can actually just start listening to songs (hosted on SoundCloud and elsewhere) while you browse. Another magazine called “Eye Candy” was created by a professional photographer, who wanted to share single, beautiful shots of nature. But my favorite from quickly scanning through digital magazines was one titled “Terrible Reviews That Need To Be Argued With!” which collects film reviews that beg readers to do exactly as it describes.
Digital magazines also feature pretty artwork that takes up the entire screen, which you have to flip through to arrive at the content inside like a printed publication. And since you aren’t spending upwards of $5 per magazine issue, it’s OK if some of the better digital magazines don’t feature new content as regularly as you’d like. Essentially, you can just follow more magazines or users that share or consume content similar to your own interests. But you also have the option of seeing a collection of content shared by those you follow on social networks as well as traditional categories.
Last but not least, those that create digital magazines on Flipboard will now have access to a new audience analytics dashboard, as shown in the screenshot below. Ultimately, those that actively share new content within a custom magazine will now have a tool for which to gauge what people are responding to.
Above: A screenshot of Flipboard’s new “My Analytics” dashboard on Android for those who’ve created a digital magazine and want to monitor what readers think of it.
Image Credit: Flipboard
Daily dose of news for busy people
But not every one wants to work to find great content. I know people my age (aka savages) that still insist on reading print newspapers every day because it gives them a finite number of articles deemed important by an editorial team. Flipboard’s version of this is a new “Daily Edition” section that’s updated every morning by a team of editors. It features regular sections like a song-of-the-day or a daily animated GIF file.
“The Daily Editions will change throughout the day, but really it’s intended as a comprehensive way to catch up on the news without going on forever,” McCue explained. That means there’s no “infinite scroll” feature that automatically loads new content for as long as you’re willing to consume it. “It’s something you can finish.”
But since no one likes to read stale or old news, the Daily Edition’s editorial team uses an in-house dashboard to find the hottest breaking news as it unfolds, while highlighting longer feature articles or particularly interesting or intriguing content. (Think of it changing in the same way Reddit’s front page changes throughout the day.)
The new version also offers a revised design for smartphones, which updates the navigation to make better sense of the smaller screen. No longer are you navigating through categories and other sections via an opening screen of clearly marked “tiles.” Instead, the updated design includes a bottom navigation bar with tabs for viewing your Flipboard profile, a search function, a tiled view of all the things you’re following (including Daily Edition), the home screen, and a new notifications feed.
Speaking of the notifications feed, Flipboard built this to help promoting sharing of stories discovered through the service. You tap a button located on every content page to share it via a handful of social channels or email. If the person you’re sharing something with is also a Flipboard user, then it’ll pop up along with a short message within the new feed.
Flipboard said the new mobile design was particularly important because 70 percent of users are accessing the service from a smartphone, which is surprising considering that tablets seem like the preferred device for viewing a magazine page. Yet, the new design is pretty, especially with the new navigation and discovery features.
As for Flipboard’s updated mobile apps, both an iPhone version and an Android version are available today for free.
Flipboard is a social magazine application and company founded in 2010 by Mike McCue and Evan Doll, based out of Palo Alto, California in the United States for Apple's iPad tablet computer. The application is designed to collect the co... read more »