Posts tagged with "flipboard"

The MacStories 2024 Year in Review on Flipboard→

I vividly remember when Flipboard first debuted in 2010, kicking off the iPad digital magazine trend that spawned Apple Newsstand, The Daily, Zite and more. Of all those early publications, Flipboard remains, and it just so happens that because we published the MacStories RSS feed to Flipboard early, the site has a larger following there than you might expect.

Over the years, we lost track of Flipboard, but a steadily growing segment of our readership turned to it as a way of reading our work. Then, late last year, Flipboard grabbed our attention again with its forward-thinking push into federation. MacStories was among the earliest to federate our Flipboard presence, which has only increased the number of readers discovering MacStories through it.

So today, we thought we’d test the Flipboard waters further with a collection of 205 of the biggest stories, reviews, and news posts we’ve published in 2024. The MacStories 2024 Year in Review collects our best work in one place. It’s a great way to catch up on stories you didn’t have time to read earlier in the year or browse through and revisit 2024’s biggest stories in the Apple world. We hope you enjoy it.

If you’re a Flipboard reader and would like to see more collections like the MacStories 2024 Year in Review, please let me know on Mastodon, Threads, or Bluesky. I’d love to hear what you think.

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Flipboard Begins to Federate→

Flipboard founder and CEO Mike McCue, writing on the company’s blog about Flipboard going all-in on the Fediverse and ActivityPub:

Today we are beginning to open Flipboard to the Fediverse, a rapidly emerging part of the Web which includes social services like Mastodon, Threads, Pixelfed, Firefish and PeerTube all built on a revolutionary open protocol called ActivityPub.

What does this mean for you? In the next few months, everyone using Flipboard will be able to discover and follow a whole new group of writers, vloggers, artists, scientists, explorers, political leaders and millions of others who are posting content and conversing in the Fediverse. If you curate on Flipboard, not only will you have a lot more content to curate from, there will be millions more people to enjoy the Magazines and Storyboards you are curating. If you’re a publisher, creator or brand on Flipboard, you’ll start to see new visitors and engagement as people discover and share your content across the growing Fediverse.

If you’re already using the Fediverse, you’ll be able to discover more articles, videos and podcasts thoughtfully curated by Flipboard’s many publishers and curators around the world. You’ll also be able to follow and converse with them directly from Mastodon, Threads and other ActivityPub apps.

I haven’t used Flipboard in years (even though I really liked the app back in the day), but I am so fascinated by this pivot, and I want to keep an eye on what Flipboard is doing.

The way I see it, if done correctly, Flipboard could become a fast, intuitive way for a lot of people to “get on the Fediverse” without the overhead of picking a Mastodon server and other technical jargon. Just grab the Flipboard app, create an account, and start following people from, say, Threads, Mastodon, and other ActivityPub-compatible sources. Once their multi-phase rollout is complete, you’ll have a federated account on flipboard.com that will be able to (I assume) read and post content on the Fediverse. Based on what McCue is saying, it sounds like that’s exactly what the future of Flipboard will be: a well-designed client for all kinds of federated sources.

In January we will release a new version of Flipboard that will show follows, favorites and boosts from the Fediverse. It will also enable replies to and from the Fediverse as well as blocking, muting and reporting.

I’m very keen to see how Flipboard will differentiate itself here from the typical timeline experience of clients such as Ivory and Ice Cubes, or even the Threads app. I’m also curious to understand if and how the new ActivityPub-infused Flipboard will be profitable (and I hope it will be).

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Flipboard 4.0 Presents Deeper Personalization Options

Flipboard 4.0 launched today, introducing a redesigned app that revolves around one core new feature: Smart Magazines. The magazine analogy isn’t altogether different from Flipboard’s previous interface, where certain topics or news sources made up a grouping of stories through which users could flip. The main difference here is found in the deeper level of personalization available with Smart Magazines.

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Behind Flipboard’s Layout Engine→

Charles Ying, developer at Flipboard:

When you read Flipboard, articles and photographs are laid out in a series of pages you can flip through, just like in a print magazine. Each magazine page layout feels hand-crafted and beautiful — as if editors and designers created it just for you.

We automate the whole process of layout design and editing by slotting your content into custom-designed page layouts — like fitting puzzle pieces together. We start with a set of page layouts created by human designers. Then our layout engine figures out how to best fit your content into these layouts, considering things like page density, pacing, rhythm, image crop and scale. In many ways, that is the key to Flipboard’s signature look and feel: at its heart are the work of real designers.

I’ve always appreciated the way Flipboard presents web articles into magazine-like layouts that, however, also feel “smarter” than print in how they treat images and text flow. It turns out, Flipboard built an entire engine that is capable of combining layout designs with algorithms to determine the best way to display articles depending on multiple variables and filters. Great read.

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Flipboard Acquires Personalized Magazine Zite

Flipboard

Flipboard

Zite, the personalized magazine that categorizes news based on popularity and reader interest, has been acquired by Flipboard, the social magazine that defined the genre back in 2010. According to TechCrunch, Flipboard acquired the company from CNN (which bought Zite in 2011 for $20 million) for a deal valued at $60 million and that includes CNN content (feeds and special magazines) coming to Flipboard in the future.

Flipboard and Zite has always shared some similarities: both companies started as iPad apps, and they both enabled readers to discover interesting articles by intelligently scanning sources from Twitter, Facebook, and other social services. Unlike Flipboard, however, which has been focusing on its editorial and user-created magazine efforts in the past couple of years, Zite has continued to prioritize automatic, algorithm-based discovery of content: Zite had a mechanism that allowed users to vote for the quality of articles offered by the app, as well as a propretary engine to analyze web trends, topics, and user interests to further filter articles.

In a blog post, Zite co-founder and CTO Mike Klaas has confirmed that the Zite app will be discontinued, although tools to migrate accounts and user data to Flipboard will be offered to existing Zite users. In a separate post on LinkedIn, Zite CEO Mark Johnson announced that, unlike the rest of the Zite team, he won’t be joining Flipboard, and that the combination of the two companies will be an “epic force”.

Behind the deal, what’s interesting is the kind of technology that Zite will bring to Flipboard. Besides the obvious social aspect that enabled Zite to look at links shared by a user on Twitter and other services, Zite had built algorithms to calculate the credibility of a user, match names and places in articles, characterize writing style and parts of speech with semantic classifiers, collect article metadata, and analyze context with text mining techniques to better summarize content. And these were just a part of the system Zite had in place: as the company detailed two years ago, Zite could collect and match user interests over time, aggregate reading habits and interests of a community of users, and find relationships between similar articles and related topics.

The interest graph and artificial intelligence that Zite created has high potential for Flipboard, which has long allowed users to browse Cover Stories, a feature that shows popular articles (based on the Ellerdale tech that Flipboard acquired in 2010), but that isn’t as powerful as Zite for discovering new, interesting stories.

Flipboard, launched in July 2010 three months after the debut of the original iPad, has now over 100 million users, and recently started rolling out an update to their Cover Stories layout to organize articles by source, social network and topic.

You Can Finally Create Magazines of Cat GIFs in Flipboard→

Straight from the Inside Flipboard blog:

Who doesn’t love GIFs? Flipboard readers have already incorporated them into lively magazines like “Just GIF It,” “GIF Pop” and “GIF Me a Break.” Already on Android, GIF support comes to Flipboard for iPad and iPhone—so now anyone can collect and share their favorites in a magazine. (To celebrate, we’ve got some GIF-centric magazines we love featured today in By Our Readers. Tap on the red ribbon to find them in the Content Guide.)

In Flipboard 2.0.5 (App Store link), you’ll also get access to the latest Top Stories in Tech, News, Business, and Sports. Flipboard is also emphasizing the social aspects of their app by making it easier to find curators and prompting you to share your magazine with others once you’ve saved ten articles.

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Resolve Short URLs with Pythonista on iOS

Clean URLs

Clean URLs

I don’t like it when third-party apps or services force me to share links to articles or webpages using their own custom shortened links. I understand the appeal of personalized short domains – after all, we tweet mcstr.net links with the @macstoriesnet account – as they can provide analytics to track clicks, can save characters, and, at least in theory, they “look cool”. However, I’ve been long considering the idea of dropping our mcstr.net links, but I think the issue is worse (and more annoying) for apps and services that don’t tweet links to their own content (like we do) but that override others’ links with different domains. An example is Pocket, which gives you the clean, original URL when you choose the “Copy Link” action from the sharing menu, but that instead returns pocket.co links when sending text to Drafts (which I do often). I’ve grown tired of this practice (in Pocket and other services), and I’ve put together a workflow based on a Python script that allows me to easily resolve short links without having to open the browser and tap on multiple menus. Read more

Share To Flipboard Magazines From Drafts

Flipboard

Flipboard

I’m a big fan of Flipboard’s magazine feature, which was introduced earlier this year with version 2.0 of the app. By leveraging Flipboard’s existing presentation style – capable of re-formatting web articles, videos, and photos with a beautiful print-like layout – magazines allow anyone to put together a collection of interesting links that others can subscribe to, read, and share. I am subscribed to dozens of Flipboard magazines and I send links to my Games one on a daily basis.

Most of my automation tips stem from minor annoyances with default solutions, so yesterday I decided to create a simple, yet effective Drafts URL action to easily open Flipboard’s share interface without having to read a webpage in the browser. Read more

Flipboard 2.0.2 Surfaces Magazines Your Friends are Sharing

New Profile and Friends Screens

New Profile and Friends Screens

Having just shipped a web editor for managing magazines, Flipboard released a small update this morning that focuses on bringing forward basic readership activity and the magazines your friends are curating, as well as adding more options for sharing articles with a new share menu.

Flipboard is continuing to flesh out features related to magazines by first revisiting profiles. Profiles have been updated to display some basic information such as the number of magazines you’re sharing and the number of readers that are currently subscribed to the content that you’re curating. You can’t delve into any kind of trend data at the moment (as you can with Pocket for Publishers for example) — all Flipboard is providing are simple stats that don’t divulge specifics.

Magazines, being a focal point since Flipboard hit verison 2.0, are now included in an additional Friends category as you open the Content Guide. Instead of searching for topics or things you like, you can browse the magazines your friends are publicly curating and subscribe to them. Friends, for example, can be pulled in from Twitter if you’ve added your Twitter account for browsing Tweets and links.

New Share Menu Screen

New Share Menu Screen

The share menu has been vastly improved, and I’m very happy with what’s been done to make sharing links easier than ever. Flipboard now plugs into a variety of social networks, letting you tap icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in addition to email and sharing via SMS. There’s also new options for copying links to the articles and saving photographs to the Camera Roll.

While Google Reader is being shut down on June 1st, Flipboard is continuing to improve upon integration with the RSS service by making it easier to navigate folders.

Flipboard is available as a free download from the App Store.