By Om Malik
Mike McCue, the founder of Flipboard, loves the media. He loves reading, watching, and immersing himself in what other Silicon Valley types derisively think of as “content.” McCue, not surprisingly, has spent the past 15 years creating a way to better consume media digitally. He was at ground zero of the web revolution — he worked at Netscape, the first portal to a digital universe for most average people. A decade and a half ago, soon after Steve Jobs announced the iPad, McCue started Flipboard.
At its buzziest, it raised more than $200 million from venture capitalists such as Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, Rizvi Traverse, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs. It managed to attract the best and brightest talent, especially designers. The startup came up with interesting designs and innovative concepts to display information on iPad and iPhone screens. It talked about using machine learning as a way to organize information. It wanted everyone to create their own magazines. It aimed to give traditional media a platform to recreate their products and make money from advertising.
As is often the case, the first mover is usually the one with the most arrows in its back. Flipboard has lost its buzz. It hasn’t gone away, and neither has McCue. Flipboard went through a reset, and McCue is now funding it with his own money alongside investment from his former backer, John Doerr. Along with running Flipboard, he has been quietly building something new — an app called Surf. I wondered aloud if this was Flipboard 2.0. “It’s a completely new product from Flipboard,” said McCue. “It’s as if I started Flipboard over again, knowing everything I know and learned.”
Surf is centered on human curation, authentic connection, and a rejection of the interruption-driven media models we’ve endured for far too long. Just as vinyl records pushed back against a generation of digitized, algorithm-driven music, Surf is a retro reimagination of our algorithm-fueled, advertising-driven information economy.
What people want is “easy access to trusted content without managing multiple platforms, creating new profiles, or using separate apps for video, audio, and text,” McCue said. They desire a streamlined consumption experience. “It’s a complete rebuild of Flipboard, leveraging everything we’ve learned, built from scratch on W3C’s ActivityPub and AT Proto foundations,” McCue said.
Surf emerges as an antidote to this fractured media landscape. It reimagines the web browser not as a tool for managing tabs and URLs but as an integrated curator of the social web. "Users can create feeds that combine articles, photographs, videos, and podcasts, regardless of the original platform," McCue explained. "You can interact with posts—like, comment, boost—and your interactions appear on the platforms you're logged into. These feeds can also be shared, so if you create a great photography feed, others can follow it."
The result is a seamless stream that pulls together content from across platforms—whether it's photographers on Mastodon, YouTubers, or podcast creators—into a coherent, personalized experience. Surf is built on open protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol. This means it doesn't lock users into a specific platform or ecosystem. Whether you're pulling content from Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky, or a legacy RSS feed, Surf integrates it seamlessly.
“Mass-market media is the problem,” McCue said. “When I look at CNN, it’s generic information. What I want is richer, more detailed content. For example, I don’t want a generic sailing magazine. I want to follow a sailor who’s actually out there navigating tidal currents, fixing their diesel engine, and sharing those experiences authentically.”
This is not to say that what CNN and The New York Times do isn’t important, or that we should totally walk away from the idea of everyone accessing the same set of stories to form a consensus view of the present. However, the reality is that the internet and technology give us power over what we consume, where, when, and how. Just as the mass media of the past made choices for us, the internet platforms have limited our options to what they decide, algorithmically of course, is good for us to see.
Surf wants to transform discovery from an algorithmic process into a human one. Consider how it works in practice:
Let’s say I create a feed focused entirely on film photography. I’ll find relevant photographers and accounts on various social networks and add them to a feed. For photographers with blogs, I’ll add their feeds to the mix. I can add photos from Flickr or Glass as well. Surf makes it easy to incorporate hashtag-based content. It offers filtered views for images, videos (with an autoplay option), and podcasts. Once it’s ready, I can share it.
Another analog photography enthusiast can take my feed, remix it, and limit it to “analog street photography.” Because the platform integrates seamlessly with social protocols, your engagement isn’t siloed. You can comment on a Mastodon post or boost a Bluesky update directly within Surf, maintaining your presence on those platforms while customizing your experience.
“The graph that gets built is just part of the open web,” McCue said. “No one company owns it. And what’s even better is you own it. When people follow you, you own that relationship for as long as that person wants to follow you. It’s not dependent on Twitter; it’s not dependent on a given platform anymore. And that is an absolute game-changer.”
While there is no explicit use of generative AI to create content, McCue is not shy about using these tools to enhance the experience or help build better personal feeds. For him, AI and ML are merely tools that serve as a means to an end.
For years, McCue has been thinking about the shortcomings of our current internet ecosystem. Social media platforms, built around algorithmic feeds and advertising models, have reduced content discovery to a game of clicks, likes, and engagements. Mass-market media has followed suit, optimizing for sensationalism rather than depth. All of it, from podcasts to news apps, interrupts us constantly with ads, pushing users to exhaustion.
Having seen many such experiments in the past, I am skeptical of anything that requires people to do a lot of work. I know most people are content to accept whatever algorithmic content is put in front of them. It is a vocal minority that craves a better consumption model.
Despite having stomped on any rose-tinted glasses, the romantic in me is holding out hope for Surf and similar attempts. Why? Because they embody a shift away from the algorithm-driven chaos of social media. Instead of passively scrolling through a feed designed to sell ads, Surf aims to put you back in control. You decide what matters to you, and you curate your internet experience accordingly.
And even if we can’t win against the machines, at least this gives us hope (or an illusion) that a tiny bit of the internet can be human-curated in the way we want it to be — not what the platforms decide we should see.
---
This is our last dispatch for 2024. We will be back in the first week of January 2025 with new ideas and new stories. Wishing you all the best. Happy Holidays and a Happy New Year. -- Fred & Om
