For more than 100 years, people read the news by flipping through a newspaper. They learned that the important news was on the front page, sports had its own section, and if a neighbor were arrested for driving under the influence it would be in the police blotter column.
But within a few short years, the Internet tore that model to shreds.
Evan Doll is one of many entrepreneurs hoping to establish efficient new routines for how people consume digital news.
Doll, '03, co-founded Flipboard, an iPad application for information presentation. Apple named Flipboard the best iPad application of 2010, and Time magazine ranked it among that year's top technological advances. Reviewers praise its thoughtful layout, vivid reproduction of photos and easy-to-read text.
"We like to call it a social magazine," Doll says. "The amount of stuff people are sharing is ridiculous. Flipboard helps you sift through and find the good stuff."
Flipboard, which was made available for iPhones in December, creates a personalized virtual magazine. In addition to summoning the content a user requests, it presents news articles based on what the user's friends are sharing on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. "We can't say with absolute certainty that these are the most relevant stories to you, but we can take a pretty good shot at it," Doll says.
The outcome is akin to a personalized Vanity Fair, with serious news combined with fluffier social matter. In addition to its aggregation of established content providers, Flipboard's virtual magazine can pull in Facebook photos uploaded from a friend's baby shower or college graduation party.
Not everyone is a fan of tailoring the news to each reader. Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You, worries that news personalization leads to people increasingly being presented only certain perspectives—that is, opinions they already agree with.
Doll counters that people's Facebook friends and Twitter connections often have diverse perspectives and that Flipboard uses an algorithm that provides a certain amount of news randomness, meaning users see information that would otherwise be fenced off based on their past viewing habits and social connections.
Flipboard is far from alone in news personalization. Its competition includes Google's Currents, CNN's Zite and Yahoo's Livestand. Doll says Flipboard stands out due in large part to its commitment to design.
Flipboard's office in Palo Alto is rife with type-font geeks, and theories on layout can consume their conversations. Doll and co-founder Mike McCue decided to emulate traditional formats, rather than toss aside more than a century of incremental advancements in printed-page design.
Steve Jobs was a childhood inspiration for Doll, who worked under the icon after becoming a software developer for the original iPhone. Doll, who joined Apple immediately after graduating, came back to Stanford in 2008 to teach the inaugural iPhone application-development course. His lectures, watched by millions of people online, made Doll a tech celebrity and led to his introduction to veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur McCue.
Flipboard has grown with revenue-sharing agreements with traditional publishers such as Condé Nast, owner of Bon Appétit and the New Yorker among others.
Ultimately, Flipboard's value for users is separating out the low-value news and presenting the information and events readers want. "That's one of the problems we're trying to solve: content overload," Doll says. "You don't want to drink from a fire hose; you just want a glass of water dipped into the stream."
Nathan Halverson is a freelance reporter in San Francisco.
