Online Social Media Apps for the iPhone Review

I have used an iPhone for a couple of weeks now, using it mostly as an online social media device, and pausing sporadically to make a phone call on it. Generally speaking, it is a good device for connecting with friends on the major online social media networks. Of course there are some pitfalls, too.

The good:
Facebook
MySpace
LinkedIn
Pandora

The bad:
YouTube
Last.fm
Flickr

The ugly:
Twitter
Blogging

First, let’s talk about the Good. The free proprietary applications for Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are all fantastic. All three provide an easy way to quickly update your status, check and send email, and connect with friends. Facebook even provides a way to chat.

Pandora’s app is simple, intuitive, and offers all the functionality of the Pandora website. One bad thing about this app is that the application closes and the music stops playing when you press the home button. I’m not sure if this is a limitation of the iPhone operating system, itself, or if this is a programming issue. But the iPod app continues playing until I manually close it or press “pause”. It would be nice for Pandora to have that functionality as well.

Now, for the Bad. The biggest disappointment, by far, is the YouTube application that comes pre-installed on the iPhone. It sucks. It is fine for playing videos, but it lacks all of the features that make YouTube a great online social media environment. You can’t view user profiles, post comments, make friends, send email, or really do anything at all, except watch videos.

Flickr does not have an official iPhone app. This is a bit of a black eye for this giant of the online social media world. True, you can still post photos to your Flickr account by taking advantage of Flickr’s “post by email” capabilities, but without the ability to comment on others’ photos and check my Flickr email, and see what my friends are saying about my newly-posted photos, what is the point?

Last.fm’s iphone app doesn’t do anything except stream music, making it a clone of Pandora’s app. Without the ability to check your neighborhood, your recommendations, etc., Last.fm is merely another online radio station.

Finally, we reach the Ugly. The iPhone app store is saturated with Twitter clients of varying abilities. I have only used two free ones – Twitfire and Twitteriffic. As I have said before, Twitfire is great if you just want to send a quick Tweet with a combination of text, location, and photo. But it does not have the capability of viewing other’s tweets. Twitteriffic provides a fantastic interface for viewing tweets en-masse and for sending tweets. Unfortunately, it does not provide a way to track specific friends in the timeline. Also, there is no way to find specific friends via a search. So, these applications are good at what they do, but have significant room for improvement.

Blogging on the iPhone is mainly limited by the keypad. The iPhone is great for short text messages and tweets, but it’s keypad makes it too cumbersome to write anything more than a sentence or two. There are probably kids who can type 60 words per minute on the iPhone, but I am not one of them. In fact, I am lucky if I get 20 words written in a minute. That said, the WordPress application is a gem! From time-to-time, I post short blogs with photos, which works exceptionally well. Also, the next iteration of the WordPress app will include a landscape (horizontal) typing feature, which might increase typing efficiency.

So, that is my experience with online social media and the iPhone so far. Please comment if you have anything to add!