Flipboard Adds 1 Million Users Its First Week On The iPhone

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Only one week after Flipboard’s highly anticipated launch on the iPhone (and iPod Touch), the company is announcing it has added 1 million users to its service and has tripled its engagement. According to the company, that means it now has over 5 million users in total using the app across the iOS platform.

Before last week’s release, Flipboard had registered 650 million flips per month on the iPad. Now it’s trending towards 2 billion flips per month.

“Flips,” for those who don’t get the Flipboard lingo, refers to swiping within the app in order to turn the page.

The magazine-like experience provided by Flipboard has long been one of the most popular iPad applications, having previously been named Apple’s iPad App of the Year for 2010 and Time Magazine’s Top 50 Inventions. In fact, the iPhone launch was so hot, that Flipboard actually went down for hours.

New in the iPhone version is a feature called “Cover Stories,” which is based on the relevance-matching technology Flipboard acquired with Ellerdale in 2010. This uses reader interactions like tweets, retweets and likes alongside manual curation to surface a personalized set of top stories.

Despite its many accolades, not everyone loves the Flipboard way of reading. Our own John Biggs notoriously gave the app a “Die” in “Fly or Die,” but he might just be in the minority.