Flipboard is a gorgeous iPad app that presents your social streams in a magazine format for you to flip through at your leisure. I love it for it’s simplicity and beauty and it’s hands down one of my favorite ways to browse news for the day. Even though they still have one of the best ‘digest format’ apps on the App Store, they’re not sitting still. They just updated the app to improve performance, add a cross-platform social search and best of all, add Instagram support!

Instagram support is an especially welcome addition to Flipboard as the digest format is perfect for consuming the toy camera shots of your Instagram friends. The presentation of Flipboard works especially well with visual content and a stream of Instagram photos is perfect fuel for a progressively generated magazine like this. The social search function is also pretty cool and is a result of Flipboard’s acquisition of Ellerdale, a company whose resources Flipboard is using to create a smart algorithm for aggregating and displaying personalized content that is hopefully more relevant to you because it relies on parsing the content of a post or update and not just keywords. While the full power of this intelligent system has yet to be leveraged, the social search is a first step towards a smarter, more personalized Flipboard.

If you’re into this sort of thing, you can also check out this video with Instagram CEO Mike Mcue conducted by Robert Scoble. In it he talks about Instagram and the new social search function and what it means for the future of Flipboard and social stream consumption. Good watch.

Macstories