While Flipboard is one of the biggest new things in social media to come along in some time, it's not resting on its laurels and counting its current successes as good enough. To that end, it's recently released a substantial new update allowing for a variety of new functions to be brought into play, making the social magazine app even more compelling to its users.
Under the terms of the recently launched overhaul, users can now customize content around specific themes, like current events and topics in the news, as well as themes that reflect personal interests, allowing users to, in the words of Mike McCue, Flipboard's cofounder and CEO,"...curate the content they love."
But it's not just a new way to create and share piles of relevant content conveniently organized into at least a kind of online magazine; thanks to a partnership with Etsy, users can shop directly from Flipboard for all the assorted hand-made items that might go along with those various items going up on a Flipboard session.
Considering that, at last report, Flipboard counted over 50 million downloads to its credit, that's a pretty substantial market that may be pointing its eyes toward Etsy products.
Flipboard also counts several major investors among its roster, with names like Kliener Perkins Caufield & Byer, Index Ventures, and even Ashton Kutcher on the rolls – for a combined total of $60.5 million, at last report.
The success of Flipboard has generally caused some changes throughout the world of social media. Facebook recently staged something of a change in its own newsfeed service earlier this month, which upped the prominence of photos and videos to draw more attention to visual media. Flipboard's success has been linked on several occasions to its smooth, simple presentation of content, and with the recent augmentations, that's likely to only improve from there.
Even some major media outlets are keeping an eye on Flipboard. One of Flipboard's own partners, Conde Nast, has had to protect some of its content against its partner's roving eye; Flipboard users looking to post articles from Wired or The New Yorker – both Conde Nast properties – will instead get summaries with links sending them to the original article at the main site, in a bid to keep the readership going to the sites.
Indeed, Flipboard is shaking up quite a bit when it comes to online publishing. Articles can find their way easily into Flipboard structures where Flipboard readers can read them there, without having to go to the site on which they were originally posted.
Convenient for Flipboard readers, but bad for websites, who lose out on eyeballs and thus advertising revenue.
Conde Nast, meanwhile, seems to have found a happy medium, allowing Flipboard users to offer summarized versions, thus "curating the content they love" as mentioned previously, while allowing the articles in question to get access to a whole new audience that may well follow the link back to the whole article. This improves things not only for Flipboard users, but also for websites who get access to new readers. It might, in fact, be a good idea for Flipboard to incorporate that same concept into any article posted; a summary and a link works out better for all involved.
Flipboard looks like it will be a big deal for some time to come, and hopefully it can coexist peacefully with content providers who supply the content that gets curated on Flipboard.
Edited by
Braden Becker 
QUICK LINKS 
