CentreSpread.com - The Community for Magazine Lovers

CentreSpread is social community revolving around magazines—the real, portable kind that you buy at your local grocery store or gas station. The concept is akin to social news sites, except in this case, users are sharing favorite magazines and discussing articles and even ads within the zine. There are ten categories in which you can classify your magazine—art and design, computers, home and garden, lifestyle, etc. Each are further organized by sub categories. In each section you’ll find a featured zine front and centre with a side bar displaying titles of the most popular magazines along with comments and tags. To submit a magazine, you’ll have to upload a photo of the cover along with a brief description of points which attracted you to your chosen publication.

“Have a passion for architecture, fitness or tinkering with cars? If you do, then you may also enjoy flipping through the glossy pages of a magazine devoted to your interest. Magazines have always played a central role in our visual culture. A unique format, they represent a medium that combines a number of essential elements - portabliity, tactility, repetitiveness and a combination of text and images. Here at centrespread we only focus on consumer magazines (the ones you buy in your local shop The aim of the site is to be a central place where we can share our opinions on recent issues, the content, the advertisements that appear and our overall impression of that issue. It will be a great place to share comments with fellow readers that share the same interests. Now you can share your comments with them.”

Centrespread does fill a niche which hasn’t been really explored up until now. Magazine readers don’t have a site where they can discuss the merits of articles and opine for/against stories. The site is well organized with a wide range of categories for magazine types. The design is minimalistic, giving more focus to the content.

The site doesn’t seem to contain much interesting content for discussion. Users don’t upload particular articles, which means thoughtful comments or critiques really can’t be had. Will users be attracted to the setup such as it is?