Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue once opined about how he views the media publishing platform, that it should be “the go-to place for what you’re passionate about and show multiple perspectives from people that are just as passionate, if not more.” On Wednesday, the company is following through on that thought by launching a major redesign which puts passions front and center and further helping the 100 million monthly active users better understand how to use it.
Included in this update are what Flipboard calls Smart Magazines, which offers content around very specific topics, new social actions, a redesigned profile, a “passion picker”, and more ways to discover what’s worth reading about.
Find your passion
After years of curating content from users and slowly integrating smart technology from its Zite acquisition, the time has come to shift from what people are interested in to what they’re passionate about. McCue, who sat down for an interview with VentureBeat, said the former is about those things “that you do for fun, for work, for your life. It’s something that you care about as a citizen of the world” while the latter are things “you actually spend time doing, something that you want to take action on.” Flipboard seeks to be the place for people to pursue their passions and stay informed.
We all have a lot of interests, such as human rights, self-driving cars, technology, TV dramas, politics, pets, surfing, traveling, or even scrapbooking. But which ones are we gung-ho about, that fuels our desire to know absolutely everything about? There are probably a few things we can claim to truly be passionate in and in order to satisfy our hunger for knowledge about them, Flipboard’s redesign wants to cut through the noise and surface those things just for you.
To accomplish this, Flipboard needed to take advantage of personalization. After all, you might be interested in photography, but there are different focuses such as street versus nature or mirrorless cameras versus DSLRs. Previous iterations of the app did offer such granularity, but McCue admitted you had to “really know how to use the product.” The latest redesign should take care of that.
There were five major goals laid out for the 2017 version of Flipboard: The first was around helping identify up to five passions people had. The next was to provide a highly personalized feed for each passion to users so they’d constantly see relevant content. These feeds also had to be incredibly easy to access — previously, as very active users followed more topics, the tiles within Flipboard became excessively cluttered and also only the cover stories were really personalized, not anything else.
The fourth goal centered around rallying people around passions, turning the app into more of a community hub revolved around what these topics and magazines. Lastly, the company wanted to simplify and tighten up the experience while also adding some elements of “surprise, wow, and beauty.”
The new, new, new, new Flipboard
Above: Flipboard 4.0: Smarter magazines designed around your passions
Starting today, users will find an app with a brand new layout, one with a strong focus on images and an updated user interface. Instead of a smorgasbord of articles that appear within your home feed, Flipboard now provides a cleaner interface filled with your cover stories (those stories that it thinks resonates with your interests, like an RSS feed) and up to nine magazines centered around your passions. If you have more, they’re stored under the Magazines tab within your user profile.
“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,” McCue admitted. “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.”
He continued. “If we get you to follow a passion, you’re much more likely to be a valuable user. The problem today is that you pick your topics, but you can’t go back. Your life changes and your interest changes. How do you get Flipboard to match your changing interests?”
Above: Passion picker feature within Flipboard 4.0
Because no one has declared their passions yet, Flipboard uses different methods to onboard users. For those with an account, machine learning is used to suggest passions based on their reading habits. As for new users, the app will offer random topics such as politics, sports, entertainment, and others from a pre-determined list.
“One of the things that we wanted to keep as a baseline was create easy access to content,” designer Matt Safian shared. “We have people that like to use the feed, tiles, etc., so is there a way to blend those things? We can let you dive into feeds, but can you deliver that in a beautiful package that lets people think they have beautiful spaces? Individuals like to read different things at different times of day with different mindsets. How do you provide distinct reading spaces that feel like they’re live and dynamic?”
At the core of this update are Smart Magazines. While previous versions of Flipboard had curated magazines, these publications are going to be more personalized — think of it as a blend of the magazines the company self-curates and those created by users. “We’re pulling together everything you follow about a passion into one magazine,” McCue said. He cited the current technology magazine that exists within the app: “[It’s] currently the same as everyone else. Now your technology magazine will be personalized to you and your taste. If you’re a venture capitalist, engineer, geek person, you’ll get three different magazines.”
Above: Using the carousel on the Flipboard iOS app.
Articles pulled into these Smart Magazines come from multiple sources to be personalized and not just based on the topic of the article. “Algorithms are one layer,” remarked Mike Cora, the company’s senior software engineer working on the data science team. “One new thing that we did in 4.0 was integrate user signal in Flipboard with Zite technology and influencers, brought together Zite’s topic extraction and ranking, user rating, editorial input, and influencers” to make the algorithm more intelligent.
This means everything in Flipboard is curated to surface from reliable sources and influencers play a big part in that. Its head of curation and community Mia Quagliarello revealed that it leverages content shared by celebrities and well-known personalities within their respective verticals. So if you’re reading a Smart Magazine around self-driving cars, you would see things posted by Elon Musk, Lyft’s John Zimmer, Google’s head of self-driving technology Dmitri Dolgov, and others, but not from those who don’t have an expertise in the field. These individuals are curated by Flipboard and added into the mix. But the company acknowledges that not every influencer is included so it describes its effort as a work in progress.
The company has also introduced a new feature to magazines: Carousels. Similar to the ad format, this is specific for articles and are available in 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,” McCue said. The carousel feature functions like a related information section where you can cycle through content and data related to the article you’re reading.
They’re based around passions and are algorithmically curated, so if there’s a big story such as the immigration ban imposed by the White House and many people are writing about it, Flipboard will round them all up and showcase relevant stories. So you might read the main story about the Muslim ban, but then see a carousel highlighting a story about what an Executive Order is, statements from the American Civil Liberties Union, a story about Speaker Paul Ryan’s reaction, insight from immigration lawyers, and others.
Moving towards a community hub
As a Flipboard user, I’m frequently flipping stories that I’ve enjoyed reading and oftentimes see notifications about others that have liked or reflipped things. But the app never really felt like it had a community feel to it — it was like a regular magazine rack where you walked around, found a magazine and moved on. There are times when it would be nice to have a more conversational and community-oriented feel to it.
While it’s still not there, the latest iteration of Flipboard is giving way to that, specifically around people’s passions. “It’s about enthusiasts finding their passions,” explained Jack Mazzeo, the company’s head of platform products. “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 not bringing community on the journey with us.”
Above: Flipboard’s mission is plastered on a wall in the company’s Palo Alto, Calif. office.
As users find their passions, there’s a likelihood of new tools that could emerge in the future which would allow them to do more than share content, but have a more lengthy and meaningful discussion about them — perhaps akin to a book club. Mazzeo said that usage data shows that those who are the most engaged on Flipboard are those who have found their passions and engaged other enthusiasts. This makes sense because as stated earlier, passions are those things you want to take action on, so if you want to mobilize or find some way to talk about the latest political issue, travel, photography, music, or topic you’re diehard obsessed with, there should be ways for you to express that within Flipboard. Hopefully those tools will be made in the future.
No fake news here
Naturally one of the issues that plague any company involved in media is how do they combat fake news? Facebook found this out the hard way, but how is Flipboard dealing with it? McCue claimed his app won’t encounter the same situation that has tripped up others platforms. “Flipboard is the definitive place to go for news and politics, not trending news,” he said. “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.”
Above: Flipboard chief executive Mike McCue at the company’s new office in Palo Alto, Calif. on May 12, 2016.
He also said that the app isn’t powered by your friends, people that you know or follow. Instead, it’s about sources — it’s the center of the information Flipboard collects to share with users. Additionally, editors are going to go out and vet key influencers and personalities, bringing in sources from the left and right, domestic, international, large and small. And it’s an evolving process. But the team knows it can’t identify all sources so anyone that wants to contribute to Flipboard can email the company in order to be approved. If a determination can’t be made, then third-parties are brought in to evaluate the content.
“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,” McCue affirmed.
Some publications won’t be approved by editors, such as conservative publication Breitbart. According to McCue, users won’t be shown content from it because “it’s been known to display fake news” or propaganda. However, he wanted to make clear that his company wants to make sure that all sides are being presented, which is where the carousel feature will play an important role.
McCue believes there’s a reason why 100 million monthly active users are coming to his app: “They want to see good quality content and not be led astray to terrible websites that are very easy to run into that are dealing with things that are trending.”
Flipboard version 4 is now rolling out across iOS, Android, and the web. Full tablet support will be available soon.
