Skyfire, the popular browser for iPhone, and Flipboard, the popular social magazine for iPad, are going even more social for iPad.
The Skyfire browser made a big splash with Flash on iPhones, its ability to make Flash videos available by converting them on the fly into iPhone-friendly HTML 5 format. Skyfire sold like hotcakes for iPhone in the App Store.
Now Skyfire for iPad is nearly good to go and has been shipped to Apple (AAPL) to be checked out. It may available in the iTunes App Store as soon as next week—in time for Christmas. Pricing hasn’t been determined but could be as much as $4.99.
Skyfire will offer the converted Flash a la the iPhone. But Gadget Venue noted: “As well as matching the iPhone version, [Skyfire] also does a few things better in that it can natively display twitter and Google reader feeds within the browser rather than you loading up the individual apps to see those.”
New features for iPad are aimed at popular Facebook, Twitter and Google (GOOG) apps and include:
—Facebook and Twitter Quickview with one- touch access to Facebook and Twitter.
—Fireplace Feed Reader to provide a filtered list of one’s Facebook feed with links to browsable web pages, images and videos posted by friends.
—Facebook Like Button is available for any page on the Internet.
—Google Reader with one-touch link to Gmail, Buzz and RSS.
A demo is available at YouTube.
All this social networking may not be everyone. Greg Kumparak said in MobileCrunch: “I don’t want Facebook, or Twitter, or any other social network to be a part of the core browsing experience.” But, as he noted, you can be a grinch and just use the browser and watch the videos.
In other iPad news, Flipboard, the social magazine reader for iPad, has added some significant updates. Flipboard describes the new app as “sleeker, faster and even more social.”
The updated Flipboard, which presents feeds in a magazine format rather than as an inbox list, offers support for Google Reader and Flickr along with enhanced navigation and better content sharing.
A demo of the “more social” version is available at YouTube.
Sarah Perez reported at ReadWriteWeb: “You can now do nearly everything in Flipboard that you can with Google Reader’s own web app at google.com/reader, except for sharing items with a note, searches or managing subscriptions.”
Flipboard was named Apple’s iPad App of the Year and one of Time magazine’s top 50 innovations for 2010.
