Mike McCue
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Flipboard rolls out newsfeed personalization tools to save you from doomscrolling
Facebook is preparing to adjust its News Feed to de-emphasize political posts and current events, but news reader Flipboard is instead rolling out an update that puts users in control of their own feeds. The company announced this morning the launch of a new controller on the cover of its own main newsfeed, aka the “For You” feed, which now allows users to select new topics to follow and deselect those they no longer want to hear about. The feature, which Flipboard dubs “an antidote to doomscrolling,” allows users to customize their For You feed to deliver a wider selection of stories related to their various interests, instead of focusing their home page on breaking news and politics.
Given today’s current events — a pandemic that’s dragging on, climate change-induced wildfires and major storms, the fall of Afghanistan and other disasters — it’s no wonder why people want to take a break from the daily news. But for Flipboard, that trend could mean reduced use of its news-reading app, as well.
But while Flipboard notes that millions do use its app to keep up with breaking stories and politics, a majority of its user base also spends their time engaging with other topics — like travel, food, photography, fitness and parenting.
Image Credits: Flipboard
By introducing tools that allow users to customize their own feeds, the company believes users will not only see improved mental health, but will also spend a longer time in the Flipboard app. Already, this appears to be true, based on other recent changes Flipboard has made.
The company recently introduced topic personalization features, which allowed users to zero in on more niche interests — think, not just cooking but keto cooking; not just health, but mindfulness and sleep, for example. Users who customized their preferences spent between nine and 12 minutes per day reading stories about these topics, on average, Flipboard found.
With the launch of For You newsfeed controls, Flipboard wants to bring a similar level of customization and control to users’ own homepages.
The company said the feature also addresses the top request from users — they’ve been asking to have more control over the content selection in their For You feed.
To use the feature, you’ll look for the new filter toggles at the top of the main page. After tapping the icon, you’ll be launched into a window where you can tap and untap a range of topics. You can also use the search bar to discover other interests that may not be listed. When you’re finished customizing, you’ll just tap “Save” to exit back to your newly customized For You feed.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Flipboard hopes its customization capabilities will help it stand out from other news reading experiences — whether that’s browsing news inside social media feeds or even in dedicated news reading apps.
“This level of content control is unique to Flipboard; just think about how hard it is to adjust your feed on any other platform,” noted Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, when introducing the update. “A highly personalized feed empowers people to focus on the things that matter to them, without being distracted by doomscrolling, misinformation or browsing through other people’s lives. We build a platform that lets people take control of their media consumption rather than letting it control them,” he added.
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Flipboard rolls out Storyboards as a new way to highlight content
Flipboard is giving news publishers and other curators on the platform a new way to highlight content through a format called Storyboards.
Until now, Flipboard has largely focused on its Smart Magazines, which are ongoing collections that mix human and algorithmic curation, allowing readers to dive deeply into and keep up-to-date on a given topic.
Storyboards, on the other hand, are more of a one-time collection of articles, videos, podcasts, tweets and other media. Content-wise, they may not be that different from an “everything you need to know about X” roundup article, but they give publishers an easy and visually stylish way to put those roundups together.
Publishers have already been beta testing it. For example, TheGrio created a Storyboard collecting the latest coverage of George Floyd’s death and the resulting protests, while National Geographic curated a package of new and old stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the eruption of Mount St. Helens. And TechCrunch tried it out by doing daily roundups of coverage coming out of last year’s Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Flipboard CEO Mike McCue told me this is something curators have been asking for, as a way to “structure their curation better and be able to do better storytelling.”
He also said that Storyboards could be a great way to highlight different products and make money with affiliate links, especially since “curated commerce is something that will probably play more and more of a significant role in our revenue.”
Vice President of Engineering Troy Brant gave me a quick tour of the product, showing me how a curator can create different sections in a Storyboard, tweak the look of those sections and populate them with different kinds of content.
These new Storyboards can be discovered in Flipboard based on the topics with which the curator tags them. They’re also shareable and embeddable via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and email.
Image Credits: Flipboard
Brant noted that Storyboards are “complementary” with Flipboard magazines, as magazines can include Storyboards and Storyboards can include magazines. He also said the company is developing “more product capabilities” to highlight the best curation, whether that takes the form of a Storyboard or magazine: “That’s actually a work in progress at the moment.”
And Storyboards come with detailed analytics about how many people are viewing them, liking them, commenting on them, flipping them and more.
All of this is part of a new tool in Flipboard called Curator Pro, which is now available to all verified users in English-speaking countries, with plans for a more global rollout soon. Brant added that Storyboards are just the “first step” for Curator Pro, with more magazine curation tools and analytics on the way as well.
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Flipboard opens up to more publishers by embracing the mobile web
Flipboard is changing the way it works with online publishers, thanks to two connected announcements. First, publishers no longer need to work directly with Flipboard in order to get their stories into the app. Instead, there’s a new self-serve signup option, allowing Flipboard to automatically pull in stories from publishers’ RSS feeds. To be clear, CEO Mike McCue said… Read More
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Videos are getting a bigger role on Flipboard
Flipboard is following the launch of its “smart magazines” by boosting the role of videos. It’s not that videos were totally absent from the news app before this, but they usually showed up as an accompaniment to articles — not exactly prominent placement when compared to the beautiful treatment that Flipboard would often give photos. Now, CEO Mike McCue said videos… Read More
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