Last week, I got a kind of tweet I hadn't seen before. It was an audio-tweet from TinyVox, an app for iOS and Android that lets users send voice messages to anyone on the Web or just keep them as memos. That doesn't sound like a new idea, but that's the point. As you can see from the interface, TinyVox is all about recovering an old, beloved medium we've lost: the heartfelt mixtape.
My audio-tweet was from Srini Kumar, developer of TinyVox. He wanted to know what I thought of the app's "voicemail on Twitter" approach and its retro cassette tape aesthetic. I said I'd be happy to check it out on the condition that we conduct our interview asynchronously, back and forth over TinyVox. So we did, and I learned more about communication than any social app has taught me in a while.
Showyou 3.0 launches today, and if you watch videos on an iPad, a Kindle Fire, an iPhone or an iPod Touch, you need to try it. If you have an Apple TV, so much the better. Showyou brings in all the videos from your various social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and more. It displays them for you in a glorious, sweeping grid organized by magic. The new version makes browsing a little more down-to-earth, too (in a good way), adding category channels, browsable lists for individual users, and an easier navigation tray.
We've compared Showyou's previous versions to Flipboard and Instapaper, which is pretty esteemed company for an iOS app. As a set of features, those comparisons are apt. But the interface takes it a step further. The app takes full advantage of the touchscreen. It's a better interface than TV has ever had. And you don't just watch on your device; you can AirPlay it to your Apple TV and just use Showyou as the remote. Whatever it was about TV that Steve Jobs said he "finally cracked," it was probably something like this.
When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it's all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need?
Lately, we've started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here's a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.
Forget the random pictures of babies and puppies, alarming status updates from family members and political rants. On My-ArtMap, you will be immersed in art. It's as simple as that. The site, which is targeted at an international audience, is available in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Chinese. You can create a username and password for the site, or login using Facebook Connect. My-ArtMap is also available as an iPhone app.
Last month, I wrote about a startup with a win-win proposition called BetaBait, which helps beta apps connect with testers. It allows developers to list their app in an email to interested testers for free. It charges $50 for a sponsor slot featured at the top of the email. No-brainer, right?
Co-founder Cody Barbierri wrote in to let me know that, in the two weeks since launch (and it was over the holidays, too!), they added over 1,400 testers and 250 start-ups. The email was getting too long, so they've revamped the process. Only newly submitted apps will be in the email, and the rest are listed on the BetaBait site.
Google updated the Google Translate iOS app today adding iPad support. It's the same set of features as the iPhone version, but the iPad is a great place for a free translator. Technophiles are reading more on tablets lately, and a free Google Translate app is a boon for a more literate, global wired society.
Google Translate has been available on the iPhone since the mobile Web version launched in 2008. The native app released last year added the voice-to-text feature as well as the spoken translations from Google's voice synthesizer. As one should expect, the translations are never perfect, but they're great for getting the gist.
The social Web is noisy. Each individual social network is noisy enough, but there's a second layer of noise - notifications - in which all the social apps compete with each other just to draw the user in. The creator of Handpick sent me along his solution today, and I love where it's going.
Handpick is a social Web app that doesn't interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you've created. When you click 'share,' it doesn't buzz all your friends' phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.
Friday night, New-Year's-Eve Eve, I had just stepped away from my blogging station when Yobongo CEO Caleb Elston recommended I open the app. That's interesting, I thought to myself. I never had to download an update. I've been watching Yobongo since it launched. It has only been open in Austin, New York and San Francisco since its debut, but I've kept my version updated, anyway. When it launched in my area, I didn't want to miss it.
So when I opened Yobongo on Friday, my first thought was, There must be a Web app in here somewhere. My second thought was, Oh, wow! Global Yobongo chat and private rooms are open to everyone! So that's the news. You can now use Yobongo no matter where you are, although the location-specific rooms are still only in select cities. But there's more. As Caleb told me coyly, "iPhone is just the start" for Yobongo. "We want to help people communicate more efficiently," Elston says, and that means everybody.
WordPress has released version 2.0 of its Android app for mobile blogging, and as a WordPress for iOS user, I am jealous. The new app launches with a screen that covers just about every first action a mobile blogger needs. It's arranged in correct order of priority, and it uses a big, easily tappable grid of buttons with an "action bar" over the top to handle the rest.
Other additions are catching up with WordPress for iOS, but they're welcome. The post editor now has a formatting toolbar above the keyboard, and the app now has a tablet view. The app also adds post uploading in the background and gets a few other fixes. This is an open-source app, and it's the best mobile blogging interface I've seen yet. What's up with everybody else?
The smartphone explosion has invited a bum-rush of new apps - and extensions of old ones - vying to be the way we discover places. Companies big and small are fighting to be the best location data platform. Google and Yelp struggle for dominance of business listings, and valuable geo data providers like SimpleGeo are selling for big bucks.
ReadWriteWeb gets tips about new consumer-facing location apps every day. We like the futuristic whiz-bang idea of augmented reality, so we tend to write these up every once in a while. But geolocation apps have not yet caught on in consumers' minds. That's because most offerings focus on monetizing location, leaving the user interface as an afterthought. Today, I think that changed. I found Localscope, the first location app I've ever used that I think I'll use every day.
