Take In Email, RSS, Facebook And Twitter All At Once With Faast

Faast (Free) by Fabien Penso is a highly customizable social media hub that collects your email, RSS feeds, Twitter, and Facebook all under one roof. It acts like an email inbox, but for all of these services. My first thought when coming across this was, is this really a smart idea?

Adding accounts is relatively normal, except for when dealing with email. Instead of signing in as you normally would, you must set your mail to forward to an address ending in @4push.com. I don’t mind this setup, but it does seem quite unusual.

After getting past this initial quirk, the app will start pulling in updates from each service. Whenever someone tweets, posts to Facebook, sends you an email, or publishes to an RSS feed, you will receive a notification. These alerts can be disabled, but only for services as a whole.

In the app, there are a few different views that display your content. The All Items inbox, which is the main place to be acts as a huge collecting duct for everything. Here, there are some swipe actions that can be initiated on individual list items, including the ability to star, share, or delete them. Keep in mind that these actions are only applied within Faast, and nowhere else.

If it is too much for you to see all of your RSS feed updates, tweets, Facebook posts, and emails vomited into the same list, you can view content through the Filters area. Here, they are divided between their respective services, so you can browse through them more sanely.

You can also view posts that are unread, starred, or involving discussions with other Faast users in their own lists. To change between all of the lists and views in the app, just hit the trusty “hamburger” button at the top left.

In order to use all of the app’s features, you will have to sign up for a Basic, Standard, or Premium plan. These plans will run you $1.99, $4.99, or $9.99 a month, respectively, with yearly subscriptions also available. Each tier allows a different amount of sources to be added in the app.

Faast is a solid app for what it does, and can serve as a decent home for one’s most frequently used social media services. My issue with the app is that it has me asking why? Why would someone find this useful?

I only subscribe to a few RSS feeds, receive a small amount of emails per day, and follow a few people on Facebook and Twitter, and I still find this app to be out of control. Maybe it is just me, but I cannot imagine someone who is willing to use this app, let alone pay for the service.

Still, if Faast is something you would like to check out, it is free in the App Store for iPhone and iPad. It also comes with a free trial period.

If you decide to have a look at Faast, tell us about your experience in the comments. Do you find it to be very cluttered like I do, or have you found a good use for it?