Flipboard has updated its popular digital magazine app for iOS, letting users curate their own personal magazines from selected news feeds.
Previously, Flipboard highlighted articles and photos user’s friends were sharing on Facebook and Twitter by turning them into a digital magazine.
The revamped ‘Flipboard 2.0’ app lets users hand pick their favourite content from within the app and form a completely personalised magazine on any topic, which they can then share with the world.
These new magazines can be centred on a certain topic of the user’s choosing or simply made up of articles they’ve found interesting or newsworthy on any particular day, effectively allowing them to become a real-world magazine editor.
Content is added to a magazine by ticking the plus sign next to every item within the Flipboard ecosystem, or ticking the “Flip it” add-on in the bookmark bar of the user’s web-browser. From there, Flipboard will take care of the layout and even choose a photograph for the front page.
Online shopping site Etsy’s catalogue and blog articles can now be browsed within Flipboard and flipped into people’s magazines, letting people buy products from within the app.
Flipboard also makes money from a cut of advertising run within its app by media partners – McCue shows an ad for Land Rover during the interview demo – which brings up the topic of whether publishers see Flipboard and other news aggregation apps as friend or foe.
The Flipborad developers said “Readers can fill their magazines with content that expresses a point of view, reflects personal tastes or shares ideas they find inspiring. For publishers this is a new way to share archival content, publish great collections or package together stories in a totally new way on Flipboard.”
Brands using the magazine option include Rolling Stone, who have created a Beatles selection, Martha Stewart Living and The Telegraph.
Launched in July 2010, Flipboard has grown to over 50 million users and expanded to an Android version.
The new features are currently available only on iPhone and iPad, but will launch for Android soon, the company said.
