Stroodle Unites Your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn In One Place
Stroodle (Free) by Frinzer is an app that keeps your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts together in one go-to place.
Do you tire of having to check all your social network streams in different apps? Want an all-in-one solution for checking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn updates? Then Stroodle could be what you're looking for.
Upon launching Stroodle, you'll be asked to login to your sites. Unfortunately, if you have more than one account on any of these, you'll have to decide which account is the most important, since Stroodle only allows you to log in to one account each. So pick wisely!
Once you get your account credentials in, you can view all posts from all networks. Or you can choose to filter out each individually if things can get a bit, say chaotic. You can filter your streams for keywords at the top, and all of the streams have the standard pull-to-refresh feature.
With Facebook posts, you can do the normal Facebook stuff - Like and Comment on posts. You can also post on the poster's wall, which is nice. On LinkedIn posts, you can interact with others by liking, replying, or sending them a message. With Twitter, you get options to reply, retweet, or message the original tweeter. Additionally, if it's a reply to someone, you can view the entire conversation thread when viewing that particular tweet. The premise for all three networks is pretty much the same, and fairly basic.
When composing your own new update, there's a character counter (140 characters), link shortener, and the option to upload an image from your Photo Library or Camera. You can control the social networks that the update will be sent to by tapping on the icon for each. By default, all of your networks will be chosen to receive the update. Landscape mode is supported too, though it seems to only be in the compose screen where it is supported.
Unfortunately, it seems that Stroodle will only upload pictures to Twitpic. There are no options to choose where you can upload photos to, which can be a deal breaker for some. I'm disappointed that there is no option for something like Posterous, img.ly, and many of the other great image uploading sites. I hope more can be added in the future.
While the interface for Stroodle is overall very sleek and fast, there are no customization options. Text size cannot be changed, colors can't be changed, and there are no additional settings to the app besides logging in and out of your credentials. I also noticed that for Twitter, you can only see tweets with the person's "real" name, and not their username, which can be a struggle for some that may just remember usernames.
Full landscape mode would be a bonus for those that are more comfortable with that mode for viewing. In future updates, I hope to see more customization options. Oh, the ability to add more than one account for each network would be a plus.
The app is free, but laden with ads throughout the streams. To get rid of them, it's a $1.99 in-app purchase. Hopefully, the money they get from these IAPs will continue to fund the app for more improvements like the ones I have suggested earlier.
Stroodle is pretty basic, but the interface is sleek and polished. It has the potential to be a good app though. Since it's free to check out, it doesn't hurt to try it out. If you like it, then help the future of the app by getting rid of the ads.
