Latest Flipboard Update Adds Large Number of Customisation Options
Flipboard, a popular news aggregation app, has rolled out a new update Flipboard 3.0, which involves better curation of the millions of customized magazines that readers have created — using recommendation technology from Zite, acquired earlier this year.
The app, which has over 100 million users, has lost some of its buzz to Facebook which has increasingly been used by social networkers for aggregated news. Flipboard now lets you pick from 34,000 topics to help narrow down what specifically matters most to you, and presents curated, topical stories in a form of ‘Personal Magazine’ that pops up as soon as you open the app. This Personal Magazine includes stories shared by friends, and also the top stories from popular topics you’ve followed like hygiene, business, lifestyle, etc.
Flipboard has added a new feature called ‘The Daily Edition’, an editorially curated news section which gets pushed to you every morning at 7 AM, much like Yahoo News Digest. The Daily Edition is a quick list of main news stories across a variety of topics like sports, business and more, and is selected by an in-house team led by Josh Quittner, Time’s former Director of Digital Editorial Development.
While these new features proved to be hugely popular, the Flipboard Co-Founder and CEO Mike McCue said that after watching readers create more than 10 million magazines on a wide variety of topics, it became obvious that a lot of worthy content was getting lost in the shuffle, because there weren’t enough discovery tools.
The company also said that their new algorithm for the selection of the news combines the user’s preference and element of surprise together, which has been the result of the Zite acquisition in March.
The fact that users can choose from more than 30,000 topics now, makes Flipboard the most comprehensive online magazine app. The topic engine also pulls in ‘magazines’ that other Flipboard users have put together. So, for example, you like potato salads, the app will create a steady feed of stories it finds from across the web.
“That’s the magic here,” Mr. McCue spoke, “It’s people’s perspectives coming together with an algorithmic curator to create something that’s almost like a bionic curator.”
