Other Flipboard users can subscribe to these magazines, which will display the original sources for their contents, as well as comments from social networks. There will also be a bookmarklet for web browsers to enable them to do this from the desktop. When they see something they like, they tap a '+' button to flip it into one of their magazines. I've not had the chance to use the new features myself at the time of writing this interview – the update was due to launch in the early hours of Wednesday 27 March – but the demo shown by McCue during the interview was slick.įlipboard users can create their magazines, then use the app as usual to read news and look at photos and videos. Some of the company's media partners, including Rolling Stone, The Guardian* and Vanity Fair, are also taking advantage of the new feature to publish mini-magazines, complete with their own advertising. It's not just Flipboard users who can create these magazines. 'The first-generation product was really focused on consumption and reading, but this new release is focused on curation: the ability for anyone to curate content from across the internet and pull it together in the form of a magazine, then edit and share it with others.' 'This release is the largest release we've ever done, and we're really excited about it,' chief executive Mike McCue tells The Guardian in an interview. Replace boards and repin with 'magazines' and 'flip' (Flipboard's chosen lingo), and you've got Flipboard 2.0. The obvious comparison – if you've used it – is Pinterest, the site where people create 'boards' of images and videos which other users can then 'repin' onto their own boards. The big change: the ability for Flipboard users to curate and share their own digital magazines within the app.

Today, Flipboard is launching a major update – Flipboard 2.0 – for iPad and iPhone, with Android to follow in a month or so. In August 2012, Flipboard announced that it had 20m readers, but seven months later that total stands at 50m – although both figures are for the number of people who've ever used Flipboard, rather than currently active users.

Flipboard magazine