Flipboard has pushed out a massive redesign today. The update, that seeks to focus on CEO Mike McCue’s dream of an Utopian Flipboard that can help people find everything they are passionate about, is also focused upon making them meet others who are just as passionate. In what looks like an attempt to breath fresh life into the platform, Flipboard now has a string of new, smart features.
Okay, so “passion” could well be the byword for this update. Flipboard now wants to position itself as the place you go to for knowing more about things that you are deeply passionate about, and not merely interested in. Indeed, of the five goals the company had defined for itself near the beginning of 2017, goal one had to do with helping people find at least five things that they cared deeply about. The other goal had to do with making sure that people using the application had a constant stream of relevant content.
Again, streaming a lot of content is easy. However, making sure that it is relevant — that is where the trick lies. To ensure that the content is relevant, you have to offer a high degree of personalization to the user. Let’s now take a look at how the application has set out to achieve the goal:
Major Layout Change:
Towards achieving the various goals the company set for itself towards the beginning of the year, Flipboard has renovated its application in a major way. Users visiting the updated version of the application will find themselves face to face with a new, minimalistic layout that lays greater stress upon your cover stories and as many as nine magazine recommendations, All of these recommendations are based upon what Flipboard thinks you like — so if you get articles about Justin Bieber, you have only yourself to blame.
Speaking on the necessity of making these changes in Flipboard version 4.0, Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue said:
In Flipboard 3.0, you picked from a range of topics at the beginning, and it gave you a snacking feed. It’s great because it’s like Twitter, but you’re following topics. But the more you use the product, the more random cover stories become and people don’t use the tiles to navigate. For those that are new, they get the one shot at the beginning to personalize the product and then have to figure it out from there. The passion screen will be available all the time.
And of course, your passions are not constant and keep changing. You might be all calf eyed over guitar one day, and move over to cars the next. That is why the company has made the passion screen available front and center.
Next up are the Smart Magazines. Flipboard has always focused upon and curated magazines. However, the app is now deploying a slew of new curation techniques that will make use of three things. One, curation by the company and two, magazines and passions that are created and recognized by the users themselves. The company has also made its algorithms more intelligent by integrating user signal in Flipboard with Zite technology and influencers. The company also deployed Zite’s topic extraction and ranking, user rating, editorial input, and influencers all together to make its algorithms more intelligent.
Another important change Flipboard has made, has to do with who gets space in what niche. After this new update, you can expect to get articles that feature only people with expertise in the field you are reading about. So if its reusable rockets you are reading, you can expect to get stuff from Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Flipboard is also introducing a brand new feature called “Carousels” to its magazines. They are specific to articles and are available via the smart magazines.
Sometimes you want to go deeper into the news, understand it better, learn more about the author’s bio, what makes them tick, but you want to avoid having to click into a sub-feed and go back.
So basically, if you are reading about a certain topic on one of the smart magazines, the app will surface other relevant things that are not strictly related to your particular article, but add to the value in some way. For example, you could be reading about the US civil war, and get recommendations to read about Abe Lincoln and his role in the war, next.
Making a community of readers
The company is also focusing upon the community portion of the app. While Flipboard has always had the community element to it, it was never a place for lively discussions that say, Facebook or Twitter are. The company could now be working to on-board a new set of tools that enable meaningful discussion around similar passions between people who share them.
What you’ll see in Flipboard 4, we’re really creating a new baseline to build community around going forward. We have a fairly robust roadmap that’s community-related that’s post 4.0, but we recognize that people today think about Flipboard competing in the new reader market. But we think of it as so much more. We’re now bringing community on the journey with us.
Fake news? Not On Flipboard
Finally, on the topic of fake news, Flipboard said that the platform will not have problems that have recently plagued Facebook and forced it to start a string of investigations and come up with various fixes.
Flipboard does now expect to find itself in such a situation, despite the somewhat similar nature of the platforms. Quested about the why, CEO Mike McCue told Venturebeat:
Flipboard is the definitive place to go for news and politics, not trending news. Facebook has this thing that’s trending. [Flipboard] had trending before, but it was all about stupid news over major news. Users come to Flipboard to find out about the world, not what’s trending.
And of course, the stories on the platform aren’t really coming from your friends or a bunch of random strangers either. Instead, they are coming from verified publishers and prominent personalities. The company also deploys a large team of editors who work to ensure that sources are carefully vetted and verified.
Anytime you see a feed on Flipboard, it’s being driven either by editors where they’ve selected every story or source by hand. Any source that’s not vetted won’t show up algorithmically in your feed unless you follow it. Nothing prevents you from going into Flipboard and following a source.
Meanwhile, the new, massive update comes on the heels of the company launching a separate, autonomous business unit for China. The company boasts of a 100 million monthly active user-base that is pretty loyal, as far as followers go. And it now appears to be working to bring its app out from the outer reaches of mainstream Internet.
Flipboard Version 4 is now being rolled out to iOS, Android, and the web platform. So if you can’t already see the new version, you can expect to have access to it shortly. Happy reading!
