Flipboard Allows Users to Curate Content as Public Magazines

Flipboard today updated its app for the iPad and brought in a new feature. This feature allows users to create public or private magazines with their favorite collections. While many users who use Flipboard actually use it to consume their social and RSS feeds, they could not really interact with other users.

This is basically a collection of webpages that can be bookmarked and saved with other Flipboard users. We can create these personalized magazines using a bookmarklet too. This makes it useful as we can bookmark some pages into magazines from your desktop browser and then get back to them on a tablet.

Flipboard also displays publicly available magazines prominently. This in reality makes Flipboard into a social network of content curators.

At the moment this update is available only on iPad but should be available on Android soon.

Google Reader’s deathwatch impact

Just the other day, Flipboard unrolled a new setting for Android users to cut down their data plan bills with a setting that disables automatic loading of images. Our in-house Android fan Vibin yesterday came across Press for Android – which is a alternative RSS reader app to Google Reader.

There are also many Google Reader alternatives ramping up their plans. Also Digg which once specialized in social bookmarking is promising a new RSS feed reader. This is a great time for smaller companies who are specializing in tracking content publishing and feeds. The problem with companies as large as Google is they might not be able to dedicate innovative minds on a fulltime basis to smaller projects but that is not a problem with smaller companies.

At the moment, Flipboard is really coming out with some innovative features but its only downside is it does not have a web application to use from the browser.