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There’s A Lot Going On With Flipboard

Flipboard, the popular news-reading app, has been adding quite a few features to its user experience. Notably, they launched a web version earlier this year, and followed that with private group magaz...
There’s A Lot Going On With Flipboard
Written by Chris Crum
  • Flipboard, the popular news-reading app, has been adding quite a few features to its user experience. Notably, they launched a web version earlier this year, and followed that with private group magazines, making it a better tool for businesses, classrooms, clubs, friends, and families.

    More recently, they added a “compose” button, which lets users ask readers questions, quote from a story, share thoughts on an article or put it in context, tell readers about changes to the magazine, request co-contributors, add photos from their camera roll, and search the web to add content from within Flipboard itself.

    Now, the company is telling us about some additional changes. In an email, a Flipboard spokesperson told us about some algorithmic changes, an upcoming voting system, and changes to the Editor.

    Algorithmic changes include filtering based on other people’s reading behavior.

    “It looks at the stories read by people whose interests are similar to yours – (it’s similar to how Amazon recommend products based on what others have bought that also bought the same product you just purchased.) It leads to better recommendations and higher engagement. It also creates serendipity,” the spokesperson said.

    This week, Flipboard will launch a new thumbs up & down voting system. This is a way to tune your own home feed.

    “Like the topic engine with 34,000 topics that we introduced last fall and collaborative filtering, this is Zite technology we’re adding to Flipboard and it completes the integration process,” the spokesperson said. “In the coming weeks we’ll let Zite users know how to migrate – we’ve built a migration tool that lets them import all their Zite personalization preferences into Flipboard: topics, sources, and all the articles they’ve thumbed up on Zite. These will feed into the backend to power their home feed in Flipboard.

    So to use the functionality, you’ll be able to tap the caret icon at the top right corner of a story, at which point a window will pop up with the two thumbs. When applicable, Flipboard will prompt you to follow related topics or indicate what specifically you want to see less of.

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    Flipboard Editor has been updated for the “most active” curators, giving them more control over their magazines from a web interface.

    “For curators, knowing how their magazines perform on Flipboard can help them improve as magazine makers,” the spokespersons said. “The new analytics give curators a sense of what types of articles resonate the most with their readers. With ‘My Analytics’ they can see profile stats and a list of their magazines. To dive deeper into a single magazine, you click on its title.”

    With the analytics offering, you can get a look at Viewers (the number of people who have seen items you have flipped into the magazine) and Page Flips (the number of views of items you have flipped into this magazine).

    You can hover over a magazine and click on the edit button to reorder items and select covers, and click on the stats button to view stats.

    Flipboard celebrated its five-year anniversary a couple weeks ago, and shared some stats:

    flipboard-stats

    popular

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    Flipboard, while not necessarily among the top sources of web traffic to websites, has a lot of potential to deliver it. We recently discussed some tips for using it more effectively with its editorial director. Read that here.

    Images via Flipboard

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