Posts tagged with "flipboard"

Flipboard Blocked By The Great Firewall Of China

It appears that the Chinese government yesterday blocked Flipboard, meaning the app, which is available on the App Store in China, is largely unusable from within China. Flipboad’s CEO, Mike McCue, made the revelation on Twitter yesterday and said in follow-up tweets; “Lots of folks in China had been using us happily until now” and “Guess we had unwittingly poked a hole in their wall which has now been shut down… Presumably unless we block Facebook and Twitter ourselves in China”

The block impacts on Flipboard’s Amazon servers, which are required for users to aggregate their content from various sources, effectively this means that services such as Google Reader, Instragram and Flickr are all blocked from Flipboard users in China. Facebook and Twitter, which were already blocked by the Chinese government, had previously been accessible to some users who used a VPN service, but this latest move has blocked Facebook and Twitter completely from the app.

[Via @mmccue]

Flipboard Triples Usage and Doubles Users In Two Months

Flipboard, an iPad app that aggregates content from your social networks, has in the last two months seen close to a tripling in daily usage. An average day will now bring between 8 and 9 million “flips” compared to what was 3 to 4 million flips just two months ago – flips roughly equating to page views for a website.

The CEO, Mike McCue, revealed the information in a chat last week and pointed to a number of factors that he believes contributed to the increase in popularity. Foremost in his mind is the release of version 1.2 of Flipboard on March 10th which greatly improved speed and brought other general improvements to the app. Then, of course, was the release of the iPad 2 which not only brought more users but has also made Flipboard even faster with its improved A5 processor.

McCue did also mention that the number of users has doubled – likely for the same reasons, although he declined to comment on how many users they now have in total. Meanwhile, Flipboard is continuing their work on a Flipboard iPhone app which is slated for release sometime this summer. Quizzed on how the iPhone app might work by AllThingsD, McCue said that it is being designed as more of a “weekday tool” catered towards power users that will more directly utilise real-time news and conversations.

[Via AllThingsD]

 

12 of the Year’s Best Ideas in Interface Design→

12 of the Year’s Best Ideas in Interface Design

Flipboard UX Design

Flipboard UX Design

User interfaces, when done well, are the unsung hero of product design. They’re the difference between a printer whose buttons you can figure out without even reading the instructions and one you want to throw across the room. Now, with the rise of personal computing, interfaces are more relevant than ever before, providing the crucial link between physical objects and the virtual world.

Fast Company’s Co.Design highlights some of the most spectacular and promising product designs of 2010, showcasing app favorite Flipboard alongside other notable user interfaces of FLUD and concept iPad app MetaMirror. It wouldn’t be a slideshow about good interface if Mozilla’s Seabird concept wasn’t in there, but two particular physical products, John’s Phone (Engadget review) and the Ref, shy away from our obsession with everything digital and return to the fundamental concepts of human communication, whether it be interpersonal or emotional feedback. We may often focus, and at times become overly engrossed in Apple’s product philosophies and culture, but we shouldn’t forget a world of innovation exists beyond Cupertino in numerous, brilliant ways.

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What’s The Next Step For Social Magazines?→

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:

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.

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Flipboard CEO Talks New Version, iPad 2

With the release of version 1.2 last night, the team at Flipboard has one again raised the bar for social magazines on the iPad. Flipboard 1.2, not different in the design from the previous iterations but richer in content,  manages to extend the platform’s capabilities beyond articles and status updates with Instagram integration. The coolest iPhone-only social network these days is now baked directly into Flipboard thanks to an API that allows you to browse photos, comment on them and like them, discover and follow users without leaving the app or jumping to Safari. Everything happens through Flipboard. Together with that, a new feature called “social search” lets you browse for any term or hashtag within an easy-to-use popup menu that aggregates content from a variety of sources like Facebook, Twitter and the aforementioned Instagram.

In an interview with Robert Scoble, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue confirms Social Search is the first example of the implementation of Ellerdale, a company Flipboard acquired last year to build a smart algorithm for aggregating and displaying relevant and personalized content. Whilst this “intelligent system” is still in the works, all the members of Ellerdale are now working at the Flipboard office and have shipped the very first feature last night, social search. It’s very cool in the way it catches tweets, photos, articles and status updates from social media, but it’s not intelligent yet. More will come in the next months, we’re sure.

McCue also gives a hint at advertising coming in future versions of Flipboard. Some fullscreen, elegant banners have already been implemented in the Flipboard-formatted version of SF Gate, and he says they’re indeed targeting for this kind of ads: beautiful photography, fast and lightweight. The opportunity for publishers to team up with Flipboard (like SF Gate) and set up iPad-optimized versions of their articles is also something McCue is heavily betting on. Last night, Flipboard rolled out integration with Wired and Pictory, too.

Last, Flipboard is going to take advantage of the iPad 2’s improved hardware with the possibility to create more than two pages in the main screen – currently a limitation of the iPad 1 hardware and memory constraints. With the iPad 2 coming out tomorrow, we can’t wait to see how Flipboard will benefit from faster processor, graphics and more RAM. As for the competition and all the tablets coming out this year, McCue says they’re just going to wait and see.

Check out the video below.
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Flipboard 1.2 Is Out: Instagram Integration, Faster, Search

A major new version of Flipboard, the social iPad magazine, was released a few minutes ago, and it’s a rather big update since the “iPad app of the year” was first released last summer. Flipboard 1.2, now available in the App Store, comes with ful Instagram integration to let users browse Instagram pictures as if they were flipping through a full-size photo album. It looks great on the iPad, photos are much bigger than the native iPhone Instagram app, and all of this has been achieved thanks to the Instagram API we covered a few times in the past.

Thanks to a new feature called “social search”, users can also browse for specific words and hashtags inside Flipboard. This was a much requested functionality that adds a lot of value to the app, which now can not only display content from your favorite online sources, but also search for relevant fresh one.

Flipboard 1.2 is faster thanks to a new backend engine, features a refresh button to check for new articles at any time without closing and restarting the app, has a Featured section at the top to browser editors’ picks. Again, another way to find great content you might like and read in Flipboard.

Flipboard 1.2 is available in the App Store here. In case you missed them, check out our previous reviews of the app here and here. Read more

MC Hammer Can Touch Flipboard

As a developer, you’d think you’ve hit big time when Apple names your creation “app of the year”. Or when everyone on the Internet is talking about you. Or again, when your app appears in Apple’s commercials. But I guess some developers would pay to have MC Hammer visit their offices and have the video featured on Oprah’s website.

That’s what happened to Flipboard, as MC Hammer is apparently a real iOS geek now, with an iPhone 4 he uses to tweet “30-40 times a day” and an iPad that runs Flipboard, that according to him is an “awesome app that turns social media into a digital magazine”.

Check out the video here. Also: what is Mike McCue showing to MC on his iPhone? A new version of Flipboard?

News.me To Take On The Daily, Social Reading By Article Popularity


How do you take on Apple and Rupert Murdoch? By taking a hard swing into the social field. TechCrunch has the scoop on the rival collaboration between Betaworks and the New York Times that focuses not on a newspaper, but aggregating popular content shared over Twitter. If this sounds a lot like Flipboard and TweetMag already, you’re already very much on target. News.me focuses exclusively on the Twitterverse, previewing articles in streams you choose to follow. The difference? News.me may be a subscription based service, essentially selling licensed web content. What?

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An iPad App and Something Else - Meet Flipboard, Again

In case you missed it, Flipboard received a huge update last week. The new version, which I guess you’ve been using extensively, adds support for more services than the initially implemented Facebook and Twitter. Those two got a facelift, too, but Flipboard 1.1 is all about making the app the ultimate social magazine that can fetch articles and media from Google Reader and Flickr – something that loyal Flipboard users have been asking since the first version was released in July. In case you missed Apple’s 2010 roundup of the best apps from the App Store as well, Flipboard is now featured as the iPad App of 2010. To me, it’s an absolutely deserved position and I would have been surprised if Apple had chosen another app.

Before focusing on the new features and the interactions implemented in this update, I want to make my point clear: I do think that Flipboard is the iPad app of 2010, but not because of popularity, success or media coverage. Not because of the Apple commercials or the rave reviews it got on blogs and the App Store. Flipboard is the iPad app of the year because, in my opinion, it perfectly sums up the essence of the iPad as a consumer electronic product: it’s an app everyone can use, it looks simple and straightforward on the surface but if you want – you can make it go deeper on many levels. Flipboard, like the iPad itself, can be seen as something simple, an app for non-geeks, for the non-tech savvy audience that wants an aggregator of social content. I’m sure thousands of users think of Flipboard that way, and use it that way. Just like I know millions of people see the iPad as a simple and enjoyable alternative to the most complicated notebook. But a question has arisen between me, my followers and co-workers lately: does simple mean casual?

Better: does simplicity represent a weak point of a certain product? Read more