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Review: Photoswap

September 28, 2008
Overview I fully expect this review to get more traffic than my others. I have no idea why. I'm still seeing double... Photoswap is an app that claims to allow two iPhone users to exchange a photo, a photo only viewable to one person. If you want to reply with a photo of your own, supposedly it gets sent only to the owner of the photo that you viewed. Imagine my surprise when my first photo was the one below.

Functionality

There is very little to do with Photoswap. There's a camera button for taking your picture, and there's a reply button in which to send the picture via email to the user of the pic you viewed. You can also get more information about the photo by pressing the Info button or Report the photo by clicking on Report.

Review

I, uh, have to confess that I did click on the Info button. I also hit the Report button. Although some might think such a thing is funny, the bigger "picture" is that I have no idea what the next picture to appear on my iPhone is. In addition, my kids play with my iPhone all the time, and such an app is pretty disconcerting. For an app that simply desires to have a "real photo-based conversation," I just am not too trusting of letting any old image into my life unscreened. There's issues of integrity and decency to be considered that apparently this app has not. It could be a nice idea, but without built-in parameters, I'm not too comfortable recommending it. In addition to that is the overall functionality... there is none after you view the first picture. It would be nice to be able to slide to another picture or delete the existing one. However, I closed the app and reloaded it, and the Great Cleavage was still there.

Summary

Photoswap is great conceptual app, but I can see some real danger for abuse and eeriness here. Users, beware.

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