Flipboard has unveiled its iPad app this week, creating a beautiful and well-designed tool for consuming our social information. Turning all that Facebook and Twitter chatter into a digital magazine, Flipboard has made an enviable skin for our personal "readers," tapping into the fact that social networks are heavily used as means for spreading around pertinent news and information. Who needs readers when they have friends and Flipboard?

Users of the Flipboard app can view their news content in a media-centric manner, playing up images and re-purposing data to create amazing layouts that make you want to read. It’s amazing what the aesthetics of text on a page can do in terms of encouraging a particular type of behavior. Flipboard lets you customize the type of content your viewing, whether by topic or social network, among other things.

To enhance the real-time offerings of its iPad app, Flipboard has acquired Ellerdale. The social search engine provides semantic analysis of real-tie data streams, giving a good amount of content for Flipboard to play around with. What’s trending across social networks, what’s important to people beyond your immediate network? Here’s the brief rundown as explained by Flipboard,

“With over 1 billion messages posted every day, social networks are quickly becoming the primary way people discover and share content on the Web. The result is a huge influx of incoming messages and links people must sort through across multiple web sites just to stay up to date,” said Mike

McCue, Flipboardʼs CEO. “We believe the timeless principles of print can make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.” Designed from the ground up for iPad, Flipboard creates a magazine out of a userʼs social content. Simply launch Flipboard and “flip” open the cover to get started. From the Table of Contents readers can view their sections and personalize the magazine.

As you can see, the trend towards social media sharing is becoming something of a standard, intertwined in our regular correspondence and consumption activities. Creating a business around that activity is something Flipboard has done with stunning results, choosing a unique intersection of technology and consumer behavior.

The iPad itself, already exceeding sales expectations and growing in demand, is influencing a number of trends around the news and print industries, even if they can no longer be considered "print." Amazon’s Kindle may be more popular than ever, but it’s in part due to its app presence on the iPhone and iPad that has helped it remain relevant and on the rise (the price drop didn’t hurt either).

This all indicates a convergence of technology, social interactions and consumer electronics towards the creation of new distribution and marketing channels. At the heart of it is social media and social search, harping on the importance of real-time meta data and analysis tools for sifting through it all. Methods of delivery will become the focus of many businesses in the coming year, with Google Buzz also encouraging the space, having released an API for its firehose.