Social video browsing app Showyou just launched version 3.0 of its iPad application, a major update with a ton of new features. Competing in a hot space with competitors like Fanhattan, Shelby.tv, Squrl, Vodio and others, Showyou offers a grid-like view for browsing the videos your friends are sharing on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Vimeo. Once connected, you can watch any of the over 30 million videos indexed by the Showyou search engine.

With version 3.0, four months in the making, the focus is offering users a better way to find content and new ways to drill down deeper into their favorite videos and topics.

The Showyou application now pulls in over 5,000,000 videos retrieved from users’ Facebook and Twitter feeds per day, and includes nearly 700,000,000 “social signals” (data from tweets, other metadata) in its search index.

According to founder Mark Hall, Showyou is now handling a video volume of 150 videos per second and 5 million videos per day – numbers which represent the incredible amount of videos being socially shared across various networks. With the new version of the iPad app, the aim was to use this massive archive of data to improve Showyou’s social discovery mechanisms.

In Showyou 3.0, users can tap on friends’ user icons within the app which will then launch a grid of the videos they’ve shared. Another update involves a new category grid feature that lets you see the top videos within a given topical area. You can also now browse the videos by social network (e.g. those shared on Facebook, Twitter, etc.), toggle between popular and recent videos, and browse through videos associated with Twitter hashtags, among other things.

There are actually dozens of features in this new update, some of which involve user interface improvements which, like the above, are easier to see and use than they are to explain. Hall tries to simplify things, saying “we’ve gone from this 2D grid to being able to drill down into more specific grids for users… and that interaction is going to really fun.” (Well, yes it is.)

But given the increasingly crowded social video discovery space, the question is not necessarily why is Showyou fun, but why is it the one to beat?

Hall says that one of the app’s distinguishing features is its “immersive, engaging UI – it’s really unique.” The other thing is that the app is “really data-driven,” he says.

“Doing that at scale, I don’t think anyone’s close to us,” he says, “And using that data in really intelligent ways to make the grid more responsive and intelligent is another area where we are excelling and will continue to excel. It’s not just a pretty interface, it’s a pretty interface powered by incredibly sophisticated data.”

The updated version of Showyou is live now in the iTunes App Store here.

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