Flipboard – Changing The Homepage as You Know It
Flipboard Wants to Redesign The Entire Internet. This was the claim of a recent article on BuzzFeed about the up-and-coming Flipboard, an app the added 30 million users in the past six months.
While fads come and go on the Internet as fast as cupcakes disappear at a five-year-old’s birthday party, the claim that Flipboard is redesigning the internet caught our attention. We’ve investigated a bit and here’s what we found.
First the basics:
Flipboard is a news aggregation application. In short, you tell it what you want to see (be it your Facebook feed, the headlines of your favorite newspaper, or the latest and greatest in scientific exploration) and Flipboard puts it all together for you in a slick, touch pad format. (To see Flipboard’s promotional video, click here.)
How this marks the coming future:
- The Flipboard application only works on smart phones and tablets with the touch screen capability.
- It is structured in what they call a magazine format, where image is king. Recent studies have shown that pages or posts with images get ten times more views than webpages without images – this is the future of web browsing. Written content is still important to retain visitors once they land on your site, but getting them to your site is all about imagery. This will be true whether Flipbook prevails or not.
- You can share anything you find with your social networks with a few taps, which makes the integration of news and social media nearly complete.
Where Flipbook falls short of fulfilling our dreams of what the twenty-first century would look like:
- It is not available on Android phones (yet).
- When tweeting a link, it’s difficult to tell how many characters you have to work with. The app will shorten the link for you (in a manner similar to Hootsuite), but not until after you hit send.
- You cannot add multiple social media accounts from one source (say you have a personal Facebook page and a page for your business – you have to choose which to use on Flipbook). The degree to which this is a downer depends on the user, but until the functionality is updated, apps like Hootsuite will continue to exist alongside apps like Flipbook, and those of us who use both will continue to pine for one all-encompassing service.
What this means for the average Joe:
Whether Flipbook will beat out Facebook is a big question, and they are certainly not without competitors in the race to replace the homepage. Even Yahoo is making a run at this type of functionality, and there is likely some lonely programmer out there clicking the last few bits of code into the next exciting development that no one else has even thought of yet.
The thing that speaks to us here at Tripepi Smith is the rise of the image. No matter what app we’re all using a year from now, or ten years from now, it’s clear that imagery and video are the new dominant forms of information on the web.
This is a fact that should guide us all in how we present ourselves, and our business, on the Internet.