Award winning digital magazine application Flipboard has launched a major new update for iPhone and iPad, which allows users to become editors and publishers of their own personal magazines.
Flipboard 2.0 builds on the app’s roots as an attractive social media content aggregator. Previously it had focused on highlighting articles and photos user’s friends were sharing on Facebook and Twitter by turning them into a digital magazine.
Now with the new version, users can 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.
When the magazine is published it’ll appear within the search results on Flipboard, allowing the community to access it as a resource.
Naturally, the new update will draw comparisons with Pinterest, arguably the most fashionable social network on the scene at present. That product allows users to curate things they’re interested in by pinning them to personal boards and sharing them with the world at large.
Regardless of the influences, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue said the update was “the largest release we’ve ever done” and told The Guardian the company was “really excited about it.”
He added: “The first-generation product was really focused on consumption and reading, but this new release is focused on curation: the ability for anyone to curate content from across the internet and pull it together in the form of a magazine, then edit and share it with others.”
The new version of the app has also captured the imagination of some of Flipboard’s content partners, like The Guardian and Rolling Stone, who will be using the app to offer mini-magazines packed with their own content and advertising.
The new update is available for iOS users as of right now, but sadly for Android owners – as the case often is – they’ll have to wait a couple of months to get their hands on it.
Via Guardian
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
