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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Can a new social network make it? Flipboard Surf has a shot.
- Surf combines social networks with text, video, and audio feeds.
- Think of Surf as the anti-algorithm, anti-AI-slop social network.
I’ll give Flipboard, the once-popular tablet news aggregator site, credit for chutzpah.
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After a year in beta, its new Android app and website, Surf, go beyond simple news aggregation to incorporate content from social networking protocols like ActivityPub, AT Protocol, and good old Real Simple Syndication (RSS), enabling you to craft custom feeds blending posts and blogs from social networks such as Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads.
But, wait, there’s more
Surf also lets you blend in podcasts and YouTube channels, making it a one-stop shop for your web reading, listening, and viewing.
As Mike McCue, Flipboard and Surf’s CEO, explained in a statement, Surf’s mission is to help “podcasters, creators, and publications build communities around their work and control the experience, including the algorithm. Rather than starting a community from scratch, creators can use social websites to easily bring together the people and conversations that are already happening around their podcasts, videos, and newsletters across the social web.”
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That’s all well and good for content creators, but what about you? Surf gives you “feed builders” with tools for topical filtering and moderation, so you can customize your feed to meet your needs. So, for example, if you want to create a personalized baseball, music, or political feed, you can do that. You can then share your feed with friends using hashtags.
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For instance, I set up #sjvntechcoverage, which shows you all my recently written stories or stories I’m mentioned in. It’s not perfect. Using that hashtag just shows you the title of my stories; you’ll need to click through and then click another link to get to the tale.
On the flip side, you can exclude unwanted profiles or hashtags.
Hanging ten with Flipboard Surf
sjvn
Do people want this?
The point of all this, according to McCue, is that Surf is a response to siloed networks. Instead of being stuck with whatever an algorithm wants to show you, Surf has been developed over the last two years to unify fractured online conversations and prioritize user-designed experiences over being forced to consume algorithmic content from a firehose of preselected content.
I like this idea a lot. However, I’m not convinced that’s what people really want. For example, while I’m an enthusiastic Mastodon and Bluesky user, both social networks lag far behind Facebook and Twitter/X.
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I’m also still an RSS user, but there are few of us around these days.
Back in the 2000s, for example, ZDNET covered RSS fairly often. The last story I can find about it now is one I wrote about how you could read RSS feeds after Google shut down Google Reader in 2013. Of the three RSS readers I recommended, one is now gone. Today, if you want a pure RSS reader, I recommend Feedly, Inoreader, and NewsBlur.
Sick of AI slop? Surf is for you
Personally, while I find Surf compelling, it’s not up to me. It’s up to you. That said, I’ll also note that another recent social network, the revival of Digg that I liked, met an ignoble end when it was overwhelmed by AI slop bots.
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By design, Surf doesn’t look like it will face a similar fate. AI slop, as Facebook readers are increasingly finding, is everywhere. Indeed, many people like slop. Surf is meant for those who are sick of slop.
Are there enough folks who like real content for Surf to be successful? We’ll soon find out.
