What’s The Next Step For Social Magazines?

Former Design Director of The New York Times Khoi Vinh shares his thoughts on apps like Flipboard and TweetMag for iPad, digital magazines that plug into your Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader accounts to fetch articles to display in a beautiful magazine-like view. As Vinh points out – and as we argued in the past as well – the next step for these apps isn’t optimizing performances or improving the design. It’s all about making the apps “smarter” and capable of playing an important role in your social graph:

The apps could then become more than just a reader for links found in my Twitter stream. They could let me see which stories my friends are reading, sharing, or tweeting the most, and it could prioritize what I see based on that information. They could help me form and access communities around topics, or contribute content of my own, or add associations with other, similar content. There’s a deep reservoir of opportunity here; some of it would be easy to pull off but a lot of it would be difficult to make happen, because it would entail turning these apps from magazines into truly social products that just happen to look like beautifully designed magazines.

I was thinking about this the other day. What if Flipboard was capable of looking at my Twitter stream and automatically find out the topics that I really care about? And after that, what about filtering articles belonging to those topics and visualize the most relevant ones in a top position? With the acquisition of the Ellerdale Project last year, it seems like the Flipboard developers want to bring further integration with the social graph into the app.

The process, however, includes a difficult goal: making sure the algorithm is intelligent enough to understand whether a user wants to read about content he’s interested in, or discover new articles and material thanks to the app and his friends using the same application. It’s a complex system, but someone will get there eventually. The iPad is only one year old.