Social Apps ⇥

Shawn Blanc lists a number of apps that he uses on a regular basis, many of which have their own social network. This aspect has its detractors; someone on Twitter ^[1] recently wrote that they’d use Instagram significantly less if it didn’t have support for also posting to Twitter. There are a number of these single-platform social networking applications (Stamped, Path, etc.) all essentially serving a single function, yet all with the ability to broadcast that to Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr. I wonder how well these apps would be doing if they didn’t integrate with Twitter and focused on their own network. I suspect not well.

Speaking of Path, Louie Mantia articulated a particular complaint I have with it.

[D]on’t get me wrong, the data is useful, it’s just they need a separation between notifications and content.

Posting a photo, waking up, adding a friend and checking in at a location are all of equal priority within Path. Two of these four are things that I care about when opening the app.

1. I can’t find the specific tweet at the moment, as I neglected to add it to my favourites and there is no good way of searching Twitter. If you know the one I’m talking about, give me a shout.