Newsletter January 23, 2025

Let’s Talk About:

Surf’s Up: Designing a New Product for the Open Social Web

Kevin Vigneault

By Kevin Vigneault, Vice President of Product Services

For over a year now, we’ve been working with Flipboard to create a new product, Surf, that allows you to combine people and posts from Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, YouTube and more into awesome custom feeds.

The project started when Flipboard CEO Mike McCue was looking for an outside design partner to generate concept designs for his big ideas. That eventually transitioned into an ongoing project where our designers worked directly with the super-talented in-house Flipboard dev team to iterate through countless interface designs as we shaped the product that is now in Beta. We’re still working on it now - with big plans for what’s to come still.

Read the Case Study

Articles We Love

  1. 1. Flipboard’s Surf app is a big new idea about the future of social “It’s a feed reader, and a fediverse client, and the whole point is that the difference doesn’t matter.”
  2. 2. Mastodon’s founder cedes control, refuses to become next Musk or Zuckerberg “Mastodon appears to be betting that even more users will seek alternative social networks in the future as popular apps enact unpopular policies.”
  3. 3. Flipboard launches Surf, a new app for browsing the open social web “But what makes the app powerful is that you can also build your own custom feeds that combine sources of your own choosing.”

What We’re Up To

Surf half2

You can sign up for the Surf beta here!

Be selective

Senior UX Researcher Laura Lighty has recently published her third article in a series on successful concept testing.

Brian At Hq

Brian Williams reflected on Viget's 25th anniversary on December 27, 2024 in his most recent article. We'll celebrate the milestone in earnest at our all-hands retreat, Viget25, in May.

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The #viget-diy channel has been full of winter projects from across the country! Recently, we learned how to make a backyard ice rink and how to swap out the engine in your snow blower.


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