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It has only been a couple of weeks since its last major update, but today Flipboard, the social magazine for iPad, has released yet another new version of its app into the iTunes App Store. This time around, Flipboard has added support for Google Reader and Flickr, among other improvements, including navigational changes and better content sharing features.

Flipboard, the iPad "social" magazine which launched to a barrage of press back in July, has just announced the addition of several more publishing partners, the first to test Flipboard's new framework called Flipboard Pages. This framework automatically converts traditional Web content into an iPad-friendly format, featuring full-screen, paginated, magazine-like pages.

When readers tap content from these publishers shared by friends on Twitter or Facebook within the Flipboard app, they're now taken to this new magazine-like reading experience instead of a traditional Web page. And for publishers, the result of the tap is the same as a Web hit on their end.

Flipboard Pages, however, isn't the only big news coming out of the company today.

The advent of the iPad has triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. And few startups have utilized the iPad's touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.

As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. We discuss how he came up with the idea, before the iPad had even been announced, then rapidly developed and launched Flipboard. We also talk about how people are using Flipboard (hint: it's more than just for reading magazines) and its future plans to expand beyond the iPad - including to smartphones.

Just as the iPad has proven to be a boon to magazine publishers, newspapers have flocked to the device too. All of the major western newspapers have an iPad app now: the New York Times, Wall St Journal, Guardian, USA Today, Financial Times, and others. There are also new forms of news services that have arisen based solely on the iPad's touchscreen interaction and multimedia capabilities: Newsy and Flipboard come to mind.

In this post we'll look at how some of the leading newspapers are using iPad, what the user experience is like, and what could be improved still. We'll specifically look at WSJ, NYT and Newsy.

Ever skip a headline in your RSS reader because you don't feel like investigating whether it's worth your time? It sounds lazy, but time is scarce and the proliferation of content on the Web means that vaguely intriguing headline could turn out to be a waste of a minute (or more!) that you could have spent looking at something awesome.

Today a Netherlands-based developer released a visual RSS reader he's been building as a weekend project. Like the blockbuster iPad app Flipboard, it's a way to browse the Web that's simple and fun and makes sense to the eye. The best part? No scraping.

Twitter slipped a new option into users' settings earlier today that hinted the service may soon display images and video inline with users' 140-character updates, much like Facebook does in its News Feed. Moments after it was seen and reported on, it was gone again.

With Twitter keeping mum, questions abound: What will this feature look like? Will it slow Twitter's already-taxed servers? And will people use it?

Social magazine app Flipboard fulfills the promise of the iPad. It pulls down a real-time stream of social data from the cloud and delivers it to users in a bright, personalized, touch-screen interface. The app takes messages and links shared by your friends and other groups on Facebook and Twitter, assembles them as multi-media excerpts with whitespace on touch flippable pages and adds a variety of other social features. It's not a new idea but it's a very big deal.

Launched with high-profile investor backing and an explosion of media coverage, the free app is struggling to perform under a big load of user interest. None the less, it's immediately clear that the promises of syndicated content, social news and a touch interface for real-time information are more real today than they were yesterday.

The stealthy Kleiner Perkins-backed startup called Flipboard has now been revealed to be, as some suspected, a social application for the iPad. The new Flipboard iPad app bills itself as a "social magazine" - that is, one which aggregates status updates, tweets, photos and articles from those you're connected to on social networking sites, like Twitter and Facebook. These updates are beautifully laid out into an easily digestible view which you can flip through with your fingers.