Masking the evolution of Flipboard over time — from its launch in 2010 and its early days as an app that was beautiful sufficient to impress even Steve Jobs — has been an at-times fascinating train in watching one of many few tech corporations with the braveness to remake itself.
Flipboard began as a social journal, constructed largely round letting you import content material out of your social feeds into a good looking, magazine-like format. As social giants like Fb turned off these APIs, the corporate shifted its emphasis towards letting customers assemble their very own digital magazines out of content material plucked from across the internet. Later got here the flexibility so as to add video and audio information, plus the launch of native information feeds, Storyboards, Good Magazines, and a lot extra.
The corporate isn’t even wedded to the orthodoxy of its identify anymore — on iPhone, if you happen to want, you possibly can change the app’s main consumer mechanic from a web page flip to a Twitter-like vertical scroll. And whereas Flipboard’s hundreds of thousands of customers have been oriented for years round aggregating different individuals’s content material from across the internet into their very own magazines, that can change in a giant manner beginning in the present day with the app’s new Notes and community-oriented options.
New Flipboard ‘Notes’
It’s actually a well timed launch given the upheaval at Twitter in latest days and weeks, with many customers pissed off on the modifications there now casting about for different platforms emigrate to.
We’re introducing a brand new solution to spark dialog and construct neighborhood in your Flipboard Magazines. Click on or faucet the brand new “create icon” to…
📝 Write notes
🖼️ Add pictures
🔔 Notify others to hitch the dialoghttps://t.co/fHKvVgfgMA
— Flipboard (@Flipboard) December 13, 2022
The thought behind Flipboard’s new Notes function is to offer Journal curators the flexibility to host conversations with customers (who, earlier than, have been restricted to merely commenting on the person items of content material which are flipped into {a magazine}). That can now occur through new textual content notes that may be inserted into Flipboard Magazines as sapphire-colored panels, onto which Journal curators can submit questions and embody content material like pictures and hyperlinks.
Right here’s why I like this function: For one factor, it pulls me much more into Magazines that I’m already following and desirous about. Say, for instance, I’m flipping by the “pages” of a Flipboard journey journal {that a} consumer or a writer has created. If I don’t see something that’s instantly related to me — 10 issues to do in Los Angeles, or The place to Keep in Paris (I’m not going to both metropolis anytime quickly) — I’m more likely to maintain flipping, and possibly even bounce out of the journal altogether.
The Notes are a chance to maintain that from taking place. Maybe the Journal curator asks, through a Be aware, for some suggestions of nice resorts in Charleston, a metropolis I’ve been to quite a few instances. I don’t assume I’d be capable of maintain myself from chiming in, and voila — engagement.
Connecting round shared pursuits
“On the internet, we’re launching Notes with a extra trendy feel and appear,” Flipboard vice chairman Marci McCue defined in an organization weblog submit. “The brand new design might be obtainable within the Flipboard app in your cellphone or pill in January. Notes on the internet use a full-screen structure that exhibits the remark exercise so individuals can see there’s a dialog taking place in your Journal.”
Flipboard says that in its trial run of the brand new function in magazines like The Recipe Change, The Journey Change, and The Images Change, which began this summer season, these noticed double-digit will increase in engagement.
“After we began creating these options, we couldn’t have imagined how well timed their introduction could be,” defined Flipboard CEO Mike McCue. “Including the flexibility to have conversations inside a Journal is a vital step in the direction of our imaginative and prescient to let individuals join with others round shared pursuits.”
