If you’re an iPhone user, you may have noticed how utterly useless the Contacts app is. I mean, why would you ever open a separate app to view something that duplicates what you can already get in the Phone app? What if there was a contacts application that incorporated all of your social networks? You know, the stuff that you actually care about?
Say hello to Friends for iPhone.
Friends is a fairly ingenious app by the folks over at Taptivate that acts as a sort of hub for all of your social networks. Currently it works with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Instapaper. It will also sync with your contacts list on your phone. The brilliant thing about bringing together your contacts list and your social network is that you can now view all of the posts, profiles, and updates from your friends directly on their contact page.
After playing around with Friends for the last couple of weeks, we can safely say that this simple sounding functionality has suddenly made having a Contacts app useful again on our iPhone. It may sound a little cyber-stalkery, but when you have as many friends as we do, sometimes its nice to have reminders of what certain acquaintances have been up to in case awkward party conversation situations arise. With the holidays in full swing, you may find having access to peoples’ updates on one page peculiarly useful.
Another thing Friends does is aggregate all the written, photo, and video posts from all of your social networks into one place. We found that this got pretty unwieldy fast due to the fact that we have lots of very active friends, but depending on how you use your social networks, this could be a lifesaver. The neat thing about photo and video aggregation by Friends is that it’ll magically put a preview of photos and videos within the feeds. This works even if the photo is just a twitpic or yfrog URL on Twitter. It’s a great feature that we wish was brought to more Twitter clients.
What didn’t we like about the app? Well the biggest issue for us was the not-so-smooth aggregation of all our contact lists. After importing in our phone and Facebook contacts, we were left with a host of duplicate and orphan contacts. It may not sound like much, but you’d be surprised at how hard on the eyes seeing rows of duplicate names is. We reached out to Taptivate to find out if there was a solution, but it turns out that deleting a contact within Friends will also change the contact on your phone list. That’s a scary thought for us. However, they did mention that they were looking into a solution that would allow users to edit their Friends contact list without messing up the source material.
We also wished there was a little pizzazz thrown into the visual aesthetics of the app. Don’t get us wrong, Friends is a very useful and functional app the way it currently is. But let’s be real here, LA is all about appearances, and Friends looks a little plain on the surface.
That being said, Friends is only $1.99 on the App Store right now and provides lots of functionality for a fair price if you use any or especially all of the social networks it supports.
The folks over at Taptivate are currently stuck in the UK, but recently sent over word that they would be soon moving their offices over to San Francisco. It’s fortunate for them, because Lalawag frowns greatly upon foreigners. While we wished they were moving to SoCal instead of The Bay, it’ll only be a matter of time before they’re drawn by the weather, women, and great companies springing up in LA…
