Have Your Own Social Journal With Streamified
Streamified (Free) by Streamified LLC wants to be your “social journal.”
It truly is the age of the social app era, because it seems that there are more and more of these popping up each and every day. We recently announced the coming of Streamified, but now it's finally here for us to try out.
When you start the app, you’ll want to begin entering in your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. You can also add in Google+ accounts, but these will fall under “Subscriptions.” Additionally, you can follow other subscriptions from Staff Picks, Pinterest, Business, and more. Each of these subscriptions will get its own “stream” for you to view within the app.
Once you get your social accounts and subscriptions in place, you will be able to view them all in a single stream, or you can swipe on the screen to navigate between them individually on the iPhone. On the iPad, you will be able to view each stream in a column on the screen, swiping when necessary (it has to take advantage of that larger screen estate after all!).
I love how the timestamp is shown on the side as you scroll, and it will hide itself when you aren’t scrolling (think of Path).
Regardless of the social network you decide to use on Streamified, you will be able to “like” posts, retweet, etc. It has the same basic functionalities of other dedicated apps, just all rolled into one interface. Tapping on a post allows you to view it in more detail, and you can leave a comment or reply to the post.
You can even compose posts from Streamified, which allow you to type a brief message, attach links and images, and even select which network to post to. They truly want to be your social journal.
As you scroll through your streams, you may encounter a gem that you want to save for later. Just tap on the bookmark outline, and a beautiful red bookmark (stamped with the Streamified logo) will come sliding in. This has the same functionality as a “Favorite” on Twitter, though I didn’t notice anything on Facebook (there is a separate option to Like a post). You can access your Streamified bookmarks as well, which can be found as the last stream (all the way to the right).
One of the nice things about Streamified is that you are able to control what you see in your Stream. When you tap on the button for the slide-out menu, you can view your social accounts and toggle what should be shown in the stream. With Twitter, you can be shown just your timeline, or you can add mentions, and lists. With Facebook, you can view your News Feed, Wall, and Pages or apps you are in charge of.
When you get into the app’s Settings, you can toggle sounds, live streaming of streams, and even have a large font size (the default font size has proven fine enough for me). You can also add more accounts in the future if you need to.
While I like the app, I found it a bit choppy in terms of animation and performance. Even with an iPhone 4S, I experienced a lot of jerky scrolling and animations when switching between streams and accessing menus. Yes, I did quit out of all my other apps, as well. And since my iPad is only the first gen, I don’t think performance on that would be any better, but maybe iPad 2 users can find it smoother.
Regardless, I love the UI and concept of Streamified. It is more convenient to just check one app instead of jumping around to multiple apps. It’s still only a 1.0, so it’s understandable that performance is not the biggest strength. Hopefully it gets improved with future updates, and it would be great to see more social services integrated, such as Path, Posterous, etc.
Streamified is free, so it won’t hurt your wallet to download it and try it out yourself. There is definitely potential here – it just needs more polish.
