Flipboard
Five years ago, Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike Cue envisioned a web service that would lay out news and stories in a beautiful, magazine-like way. But web technologies weren’t yet evenly distributed enough for what he wanted to do. So, with rumors of Apple’s upcoming tablet device bubbling, the company instead set its sights on developing the first iPad magazine. It turned out to be the more appropriate platform for his startup.
But now Flipboard, which has since acquired competitors and expanded to smartphones, is ready for the web… Or rather, the web is ready for Flipboard.
The personal magazine is now available on desktop and mobile browsers as a beautiful, responsive, and algorithmically impressive website where you can read about your favorite topics, catch up on news, and browse photos and GIFs.
“From a technology standpoint, the web has really evolved. It learned a lot from phones and tablets,” Flipboard lead designer Didier Hilhorst told WIRED. Things like smooth transitions and the ability to update one aspect of a page without reloading a whole page were key things Flipboard required for a successful web experience. But internally, too, the advancements of Flipboard 3.0 and its topics-based browsing made now the right time for a true web launch (Flipboard has had a browser bookmarklet and tools for those who curate their own magazines since 2013).
Flipboard is not the first mobile-only product to expand its presence to the desktop—apps like Instagram and Vine have made the jump as well. It seems that while mobile app usage is booming, offering your service on the desktop vastly expands your potential audience. Indeed: Flipboard hopes a web presence, in addition to bringing on new users, will draw extra wattage from its existing 50 million monthly active users who normally wouldn’t be checking the mobile app because they’re on their desktop.
In a demo of the web version, I was impressed with the variety and dynamics of the layouts the site surfaced. The website, like its mobile apps, is modular in presentation, segmenting stories and images into squares and rectangles, print-style. Unlike its mobile counterparts though, Flipboard ditched its trademark page flipping for scrolling. As you scroll, you may come across large, browser-width images, smaller, high-density images accompanied by story titles and text, and highlights of other topics or personal magazine-makers you may find interesting (based on your current browsing habits). It built-in a great deal of variety into the layout to help develop magazine-style pacing. For larger photographs, Flipboard uses a lot of image processing on the back end, examining edges and figuring out where it’s best to put editorial content on an image, for example, or what color background best complements a photo set.
“This is something an art director for a magazine does,” Hilhorst said. “We did this algorithmically.”
But art directors need not fear for their jobs quite yet. While the results are really quite good, they aren’t perfect all the time. “Algorithms can get you 80 percent of the way there, but they don’t really know cool. That last bit is human touch,” Hilhorst said. Flipboard relies on a mix of human editorial staff, as well as its bustling community of curators, to ensure its content is interesting and relevant, and looks sharp, too.
This mix of layout and curation separates it from the Facebooks, Twitters, and even Pinterests out there. But like these social media sites, once you click on a story, you’re taken to the article’s originating site (as opposed to staying within the Flipboard environment, like on mobile).
You can check out the new site for yourself at Flipboard.com.
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