App Review: Friends

Category: Social Networking
Price: $1.99
TiP Rating: 3/5 stars Release Date: 12/15/2010
Version: v1.0 Languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish
Seller: Taptivate
Rated: 4+
Requirements: iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 4.0 or later
Link To App

App Store Description: Y our friends are everywhere: Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn. Keeping up with them is impossible…not any more! Friends revolutionizes how you keep in touch with the people you care about. See what they’re saying, what they’re doing, how to get in touch with them, all in one place.

Summary: If you are always trying to keep tabs on your friends, but find that constantly switching apps to check the various social networks is a tedious task, this is the app for you. Suddenly, all of your friends from Myspace and Facebook, your followers from Twitter, and your business buddies from Linked In, are all in one place.

Review: As you can expect with any new app, there are always bugs that need to be worked out, settings that need to be adjusted, and interface tweaks to be made. Friends is no exception. The Interface looks nice but there are some functionality problems that need to be dealt with.

This application has some excellent potential. First off, the interface is really beautiful. Everything is in a notebook-like style from the tabs on the side to the paperclip attached photos and page flip animations. The Friends app makes it easy to go through your contact info, Social network info and recent posts for all of your friends. The navigation is also very simple and quick. From the home page, you have access to the contacts that are the ones stored on your iPhone, and groups which include all of you contacts from your iPhone plus the ones from your networking sites. Also accessible from home is a posts section that shows all recent posts on all of your sites, lists that break it down to the different sites, mentions which show recent Twitter mentions, photos and videos that only show posts that include attached photos or videos.

Friends lets you sync all of your friends from everywhere including your address book, Twitter, Facebook, et cetera and compile it into one… “Master list” if you will. After you pick a friend from you contacts, you can view all of their recent posts on Facebook, their latest tweets on Twitter and other things like that. You can also edit your contact information for them. From your contact list, just slide their name and you can call them (iPhone only), send them an email, or delete them from your address book. You can also add a new contact without even leaving the app.

The cool part about Friends, is that it lets you post to all of your networks at once. Just write what you have to say once, and then select the sites you want to send it to. You can even add a picture if you want. The app also gives you a handy character count perfect for Twitter.

Now, let’s get to the bad. You knew it was coming, didn’t you? After all, I didn’t give it a five. Friends is missing a few, must-have features. For instance, there is no way to delete a post. If you accidently double post or post something that you should not have put up in the first place, the only way to delete it, is to go to the site online or use a different app. The second thing is the inability to post your location. You can view your friends’ location statuses on facebook, but you can’t post your own. Another thing that needs some work are the sounds. The page flipping sound is surprisingly loud in relation to other apps so it may catch you off guard. Also the pull down to refresh sound is more annoying than anything else.

Other things I do like:

• Ability to see linked photos, locations, and links
• Variety of social network choices including Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, LinkedIn, and Instapaper.
• Favorites section for easy access to certain contacts

Overall, I do like this app. It has a beautiful UI and is a great timesaver, but because it is lacking some key features, it is not ready to become my primary social networking application. Maybe after a few updates, but until then, all I can say is that this is an okay friendstalking app that certainly has some potential, but is not quite there yet.

Posted by Jagz SingH on 18:23. Filed under Apps, Social Networking . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0