The iPad was a futuristic gadget when it debuted in April 2010, but the apps it presented offered a rather nostalgic revival of traditional media. Photos, graphics, magazines, and books optimized for its high-res screen featured a print-era visual polish that had been sorely missing from ad-crammed web pages and monochrome ebook readers.
One of the early hits was Flipboard, a graphical embodiment of social media that launched in July 2010. It turned Twitter and Facebook feeds into an online magazine by displaying the photos, articles, or other pages that people linked to. Previews of articles were laid out like items on a newspaper page; and flicking up on the screen triggered a visual effect that looked like flipping pages. Flipboard was among the top 10 iPad apps in its early days, according to rankings by AppAnnie. “It seemed to be a perfectly timed creature of the iPad age, of the tablet age,” says digital advertising consultant Ken Doctor, author of the book Newsonomics: Twelve New Trends That Will Shape the News You Get.
But what about the current age—with tablet sales slumping, phablet phones gone mainstream, and ever-more competition, be it Facebook, Apple’s News app, or even Snapchat? “It’s kinda like the beautiful little toe of the internet,” says Doctor of Flipboard. “You don’t really need it, but it is a really good-looking little toe, and it works well.” Flipboard has just launched a massive revamp, Version 4, in the hopes that people will feel they need it. About 97% of Flipboard downloads are now on smartphones, and that’s where the revamp starts, with upgrades for iOS and Android phones.
On the surface, the new Flipboard doesn’t look much different, and in some ways may be less intuitive. Under the hood, however, it’s enriched with better artificial intelligence to both refine the articles you see and banish sites that fling atrocious advertising or fake news at readers. The killer feature, though, remains its social component. Users have created and shared about 30 million collections of articles about their favorite topics and those can be bundled together to create magazines, and published for everyone else to read. Flipboard also pulls in content from over a dozen social networks. The latest update—being released today—is an attempt to make the app more approachable for newcomers. And while Flipboard still has a learning curve that may exceed many people’s patience, those who hang in will discover a different and enriched way to browse the news.
I’ve been meeting with CEO Mike McCue and his team since the summer as they worked to fold Flipboard’s increasingly complex inner workings into a straightforward package. It’s been a long process: The launch was slated for some time in November, then pushed to December 8, then January 26. Now, it’s ready.
A Different World
Flipboard calls itself a “social news magazine;” others call it a newsreader. That’s just one of the gaps between internal and external perceptions of Flipboard that have posed a challenge for the company.
The company has already survived plenty of tech, media, and business changes. Twitter began restricting access to the network—for all third-party apps—in 2012; and Twitter user growth has stagnated (and it’s laid off staff). Facebook is the biggest home of news—some of it fake; and Apple News now has choice real estate on iPhones.
