Flipboard Brings Its Popular Mobile Experience To The Web

Now Anyone, Anywhere Can Have A Personal Magazine

Today, Flipboard opens up to hundreds of millions of desktops around the world, bringing its popular personal magazine for mobile phones and tablets to the Web. Known for letting people keep up on their interests in one beautifully designed place, Flipboard is now available for anyone to enjoy right from a browser.

“This release transforms Flipboard from a mobile download to a ubiquitous service, a single place to follow everything you’re interested in. Coming to the Web means it’s not only easier for existing users to browse Flipboard throughout the day, but the barrier to entry for new users is much lower—now people who have never tried Flipboard have a simple way to get started, www.flipboard.com,” said Mike McCue, Flipboard CEO and co-founder.

Starting today, anyone who has a Flipboard account can access all the sources, topics, magazines and people they follow by logging into flipboard.com. People who are new to Flipboard can now sign up on the Web. To get started they pick topics of interest and Flipboard creates a custom magazine that is continually updated.

All familiar elements of the personal magazine are available on the Web, starting with Cover Stories full of highlights from everything a person follows. The recently introduced 34,000 topics, ranging from “Adventure Travel” to “Zero Waste,” are central to Flipboard on the Web, just as they are for the mobile experience.

With social actions overlaid on articles, the Web version makes it easy to share stories, “like” items, collect them to read later or package several stories into a magazine inside of Flipboard. Today there are 15 million magazines on Flipboard created by readers on just about every subject imaginable. And Flipboard helps people discover great curators and content by recommending related magazines as a reader explores.

Designed for the Web
Flipboard architected the Web experience based on one of its core philosophies: apply design principles native to the platform. This translates into shape-shifting layouts for different screen sizes and a scrolling interface and interactions with content via a mouse or track pad. To create beautiful layouts and a pacing that feels natural, Flipboard computes the relevancy of stories and photos and analyzes the type of content —such as images, videos or text— that are on a page to design pages that give content room to breathe and the reader a sense for the story.

At launch, when a reader selects a story, Flipboard opens the originating site and takes them right to the article, gallery or video. Flipboard is working with its publishing partners to experiment with new designs for their content in the Web edition of Flipboard—to create a seamless reading experience and enable more immersive digital advertising, similar to how content and advertising work in the mobile app today. The first partners working with Flipboard are National Geographic and Fast Company.

“The engineering team pushes the boundaries of performance and our designers have created flexible designs that act like a ‘digital art director,’ shaping each layout as you go,” said McCue. “For the past five years we’ve been crafting smarter and more beautiful designs with each release. We’re shipping some truly breakthrough interactions between design and technology. When we first started Flipboard we could not have built it for the Web because desktops and browsers just weren’t powerful enough.”

Co-founders Mike McCue and Evan Doll originally thought they would build Flipboard for the Web but the state of technology at the time could not support their vision. When Steve Jobs announced the iPad they instantly saw it as the platform for the personal magazine they envisioned. The first edition of Flipboard launched on the iPad, shortly after it was first available in 2010. It has since launched on iPhones, Android and Windows devices around the world and is offered in more than 26 regions in 14 languages.

About Flipboard
Flipboard’s mission is to move the world forward through the discovery and sharing of great content, giving people a personal magazine filled with stories that move them to be better at whatever they care about. People using Flipboard can follow their favorite sources from around the world and then collect stories, images and videos in their own magazines. They can then share their magazines to reflect their interests and express their perspectives, or simply collect things they want to enjoy later.