Review: Yahoo oneConnect

Overview If you're looking for an app that has great lifestreaming capabilities like Facebook or Friendfeed, then look no further. Yahoo's oneConnect seeks to make a splash that enables you to keep up with your contact list and their activities in a seamless, easy-to-use app.

Functionality

Talk about a full-featured program! For some reason, oneConnect reminded me of the app Where? and its attempt to merge multiple services into one app that just didn't quite, well, "connect." But Yahoo's app manages this successfully. You get a chat client, a contacts manager that syncs with your Yahoo contacts and your Apple Address Book seamlessly. You get a lifestreaming client which allows you to import the most popular services for friend viewing, including Facebook, Flickr, Youtube, Twitter, and Last.fm. oneConnect's initial startup time is rather lengthy. It took a full five minutes for mine to get synced up with the Yahoo server. Yawn. However, you are treated to a mini slideshow of oneConnect's features during this import time. Everything is very smooth and graphically well done. Then begins the task of using your "Pulse" - I guess they got this from Plaxo's Pulse feature. You plugin all your lifestreaming services, and each takes a few moments to confirm. Once you're done, you can click on the Pulse button, and see three tabs on that screen which includes All, Status, and Photos. These allow you to keep up with your friends' updates from the various services to which you're subscribed.

In the Contacts window, you're given a Contact List that resembles the built-in iPhone contacts app, but better. Yes, the Yahoo folks have created a much better contact app than Apple did. It's easier to navigate, and it allows you to eliminate duplicate contacts with the "Merge With" button. I loved the ability to clean up my contact list a little from my iPhone in this way. In addition, you can create an Avatar for your contacts or send them an email directly from this screen.

I have reviewed Palringo's IM app in the past, and I was really interested in the IM feature with oneConnect. It has the abilities to use smilies! It works without any glitches, and I was pleased to see it able to keep track of all my Yahoo-using contacts with blue and green bubbles beside their names to indicate their chat status.

Review

I am pretty impressed with this app. There's one little thing that knocks it right now... speed. This baby is sloooooooow. You'll see the spinning wheel more than once and at times for aggravating periods of time. You'll think there's some blockage and be tempted to feed your iPhone some laxatives to get things moving.

This one frustrating performance issue has relegated oneConnect to the dustbin on my iPhone SpringBoard. I haven't deleted it yet because I have high hopes the folks at Yahoo will find a way to speed this puppy up, but right now, it just feels clunky. That's in spite of a visually appealing interface and and all the fun features that it does have. I had no problems using it to update my Facebook and Twitter status, but why wait for several seconds (and sometimes longer) for a simple chore like that when I can use Ping.fm or any number of Twitter apps to do the same more quickly? The lifestreaming feature is a really attractive one for this app, however. I am a little skeptical of whether Yahoo will be able to increase its responsiveness on the iPhone simply because it's pulling updates from so many different services at one time. Essentially, it's Friendfeed for the iPhone.

Summary

Go ahead and get oneConnect'ed. It's a fantastic conceptual app. There's little that I would improve about its features and overall functions. It does exactly what it claims to do. It just does them at about the same speed as a worm in freezing weather crawls.

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