This article was published on December 7, 2011

The future of Flipboard: A curated magazine of your favorite topics


The future of Flipboard: A curated magazine of your favorite topics

If you own an iPad, there’s one chance out of ten that Flipboard is installed one your device (see our post). And it doesn’t stop here: demand for its new iPhone app is so high that the service has crashed.

But even popular products need additional features, and Flipboard is working on one which could be particularly interesting, the startup’s Head of Design Marcos Wescamp confirmed in a tweet:

Although it may sound innocuous at first, this could actually change the very nature of Flipboard, taking its aggregation process one step up; up to a point one could even consider Flipboard as a magazine of its own.

If you need further proof of it, Flipboard’s curator Mia Quagliarello also confirmed in a tweet that “there’s lots [Flipboard’s team] would like to do regarding story organization and hierarchy”.

But let’s take one step back and look at what we know so far. As you may have read earlier today, Cover Stories is the new section Flipboard’s CEO Mike McCue announced today at LeWeb. What this new section does? It smartly aggregates content based on individual preferences it gets to learn about as users interact with the app.

From the readers’ perspective, it means they’ll get access to the news, updates and pictures Flipboard selected for them, without even needing to individually visit each source they added to Flipboard. And as we just learned, chances are there will be very few duplicates, since Flipboard will sort stories out and make a hierarchy.

How much of it will be done algorithmically remains to be seen, but it certainly shows one thing is for sure: more than a sleek app to read your favorite sites, Flipboard itself could very soon be one of your top destinations for news.

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