Dear Mike McCue,
Sometime last year you opened up Flipboard Magazines to the world. Up until today, there are a lot of users, and even companies like Levi’s and Cisco, starting to make use of this “easy to use” publication platform.
Trying to make an attempt at creating a magazine for delighting other people with some quality content. I myself too decided not too long ago to create a small magazine called the “Future of Marketing & Entrepreneurship”. I always share interesting articles and content I found online on my social networks.
I thought it might make it easier for the readers of those articles to bundle them together for more people to enjoy. This way making a sort of safe haven for my readers to read back on the articles they might have missed out and or just wanting to read them at a later point. What started out as a fun thing to do has now already turned over in a short amount of time to over 12.000 readers (yeah vanity metrics!).
You tell the world that the vision of your company is to “to let people discover and share content in beautiful, simple, and meaningful ways.”
However putting content inside a magazine is some real pain. The only real way to put content in is by “reflipping” other peoples content, or by using the bookmarklet. This is not really helping out the publishers who want to create magazines and hinders the adoption rate of people and companies using the service.
I can understand that you and all of your employees are rather busy so could you please just share an API so we, the users, can make our own solutions around this? Maybe then everybody at Flipboard can use the extra time to create an easy dashboard with some really insightful statistics around your own magazine.
For example, your subscribers and the content being consumed from your magazine, a better overview of replies and reflips etc. so we the publishers can learn from what content works best and improve the quality of our publications. Another way, of course, could be that we, the community, can help you with this.
Let’s be honest these current notifications within the app are not really that insightful. And the online editor does not give a clear overview of which articles work best in a magazine and deliver the most interaction as well.
Let me know if you need any help!
Thanks a lot,
a semi-happy user.