Despite continued questions over its legality, the hot iPad social magazine Flipboard shows no signs of slowing down. The company announced the latest update to its app last night, bringing with it support for Google Reader, Flickr, live previews and more.
Flipboard made waves when it launched in July with its unique ability to turn any web page into an elegant reading experience. But publishers weren&'t so enthusiastic. Flipboard first started off scraping content directly from websites, which brought up major copyright concerns from publishers. Now the app is pulling content from RSS feeds &8212' which is better than scraping content, but is still questionable legally.
With this latest update, Flipboard automatically loads a story&'s original website underneath its optimized magazine view, instead of having users click a &''read on Web&'' button manually. By doing so, Flipboard readers now count as normal website pageviews on analytics systems &8212' which should make publishers happy.
The company says that Google Reader support was the feature users requested most. Flipboard has added a &''deep implementation&'' of the service &8212' meaning it supports pretty much every aspect of Google Reader. You can browse your Reader folders and your friends&' shared folders, and of course you can star, comment and share stories as well. With this update, Flipboard is now a legitimate feed reader competitor to the likes of Reeder, the current king of iPad feed reading.
Flipboard says it also added Flickr support due to high user demand. It makes sense &8212' Flickr photos combined with Flipboard&'s elegant layouts makes for a winning combination. Now you can view your Flickr photostream, your favorites, groups and more from within Flipboard.
There are also a number of social networking upgrades within the app. It gives you easy access to your Facebook groups, fan pages and photos. You can also get access to your Tweets, favorites, @mentions and lists. Not only can you read content from social networks, you can contribute too: Flipboard lets you post status updates, photos and share links across Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader.
The company says it has also added deeper integration for Flipboard Pages, its magazine-style layout that it&'s currently testing with nine publishers.
Flipboard has released a short video showing off the new features, which you can view below:
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Companies: Flipboard
Companies: Flipboard
Devindra Hardawar is VentureBeat's lead mobile writer and East Coast correspondent. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for several years, and has been writing about technology since 2004. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can reach him at devindra@venturebeat.com (all story pitches should also be sent to tips@venturebeat.com), and on Twitter at @Devindra.
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