Flipboard To Get Google Plus Integration

If you're a smartphone or iPad user, you may already be familiar with its popular Flipboard app. The first app of its kind, Flipboard describes itself as a "social magazine" and is a kind of social media aggregator that gathers all of your feeds from sites like Facebook and Twitter into one place, presenting them with the look and "feel" of a paper magazine in digital form.

For example, the app will post news stories and articles that your friends link to in the form of magazine articles that you can scroll through and read. You can also respond to things your friends share right there in the app, whether its liking something on Facebook or posting a comment. Flipboard also prioritizes what it shows you, putting multimedia stories at the top of the feed. Users scroll through pages like they would a physical magazine to find stories they're interested in.

Flipboard has been gaining momentum since it's launch in 2010, and Google recently made the announcement that it would be adding their own social network to the stew of information Flipboard already has brewing. This announcement came during the Le Web'12 London technology convention. The decision has surprised some, because in its beginning Google+ was a very exclusive network. An invite was required by someone already in the network to even gain access to Google+ in the first place, and Google seemed ready to leverage that exclusivity and use it to their advantage.

With this new announcement, however, Google+ will be more readily accessible to Flipbook users on both Android and Apple devices and its stories will be included in Flipbook's feed with all the rest. This move may gain them users and more traffic, as Flipbook users with Google+ accounts may have left those accounts inactive, favoring the sites actually supported by the app.

The move makes sense from a business standpoint, and adheres to Google's model of constant expansion into new technology-related markets. Whether this will pay dividends in the long run or end up in the failure column next to Google Glasses remains to be seen.

Author Bio: Marcela De Vivo is a technology writer and content marketing specialist from Los Angeles. She writes about social media and SEO on her blog and works with Process Moisture Sensors, Intl.