Flipboard to Add Conversational Element to Magazines, Starting With Notes

Social curation platform Flipboard is introducing ways to add conversation to the content in its Magazines, highlighted by the new Notes feature rolling out on desktop Tuesday, with Android and iOS to follow in January. “We are adding the ability for people to actually start talking to each other on Flipboard and add original content to Flipboard in new ways, co-founder and CEO Mike McCue told Adweek while demonstrating Notes along with business development and marketing executive Jessica Jordan. A new Create icon will be added to every page of Magazines, enabling Curators to write Notes to the magazine’s followers and engage in dialog, bringing community to the curation. Notes will appear throughout the platform with a sapphire-colored background and a responsive layout that indicates when conversation is occurring by displaying the initial comments in response to the curator’s Note. Users can @mention other users when writing a comment or Note, and notifications will be sent when this occurs or when other people comment on items the user has previously commented on themselves. In Group Magazines, which are curated by multiple people, every curator has the ability to add Notes. The turmoil at Twitter may leave the door open a bit for new social conversation alternatives, and that was not lost on McCue, who told Adweek, “In 2010, when we launched Flipboard as the first social magazine, it was powered 100% by Twitter. There were no RSS feeds. It was all Twitter. We quickly learned that we needed to figure out how to feature different Twitter users and curate Twitter users.” McCue was a member of Twitter’s board of directors in 2011 and 2012, when Flipboard was the largest user of the Twitter application-programming interface and the social network was considering the cutoff of access to its API, which is why Flipboard went on to build its own social layer in order to avoid reliance on Twitter and added the ability for anyone to curate a Magazine. Flipboard’s new in-house community team experimented with notes in Group Magazines during a pilot test that began in July, and the three Group Magazines that took part in the pilot—The Photography Exchange, The Recipe Exchange and The Travel Exchange—saw a 40% leap in social activity (comments, flips, likes and shares) from August to September and a 28% hike from September to October. Food content curators invited to join The Recipe Exchange this past summer included Bobby Berk, Kevin Curry, Maurizio Leo, Anela Malik and Nik Sharma, and Flipboard said the Group Magazine currently tallies 70 contributors who collectively added 5,600 fool-related stories, while 28,000 followers generated 1.6 million page flips. The Flipboard community team also collaborated with a handful of curators to start their own Group Magazines, including The Breadship by Leo, Hiking the World by Kym Tyson of 33andFree and Photowalkers by Jefferson Graham. “We are now making it a lot easier for people to start a conversation on Flipboard in their Magazine, establish sense of connection and directly engage followers of the Magazine,” McCue said. “That conversation thread alone could be really interesting content for all of the followers of that Magazine.” A new Community tab was added to the Flipboard app, next to the For You Feed, which features the day’s best curators and Magazines and makes it easy for users to discover, follow or join them. McCue said in a statement, “When we started developing these features, we could not have imagined how timely their introduction would be. Adding the ability to have conversations within a Magazine is an important step toward our vision to let people connect with others around shared interests. Flipboard is a ‘content first’ social platform, where social engagement and conversations are around a story or topic—a small distinction that results in a very different community experience from traditional social media platforms.”