This fortnight, let’s go social and look at the upgrades that some popular social media apps for devices have received, and how others have been augmented.
Path
Path is a social network to be used privately — between close friends, family, or for close-knitted communities. Its features are a combination of Facebook’s and Twitter’s, and its privacy settings are such that they are centred more on limiting than networking. In fact, the number of friends a user on Path can have is 150.
Now, Path has released a slew of features aimed at imposing more control within this group of 150. Two of them are Private Sharing and, ominously, Inner Circle.
Private Sharing enables users to share stuff — posts, pictures, messages, etc. — with a specific subset of your 150 friends. To use it, create a post, then click a padlock icon that appears below the text editor, and specify the friends you want to share it with. What’s a little cumbersome is that you can’t save these subsets; you’ve to list them each time.
Inner Circle is a social extension to Private Sharing. It lets you put together a list of friends with whom you wish to interact more closely. Unlike Private Sharing, the Inner Circle experience is factored into all features of the app. Path is available for free on Android and iOS devices.
Twitdom, SnapBird and InTweets
Twitter clients have come a long way since the original Tweetdeck, becoming more versatile with what they can fish out and figure out based on the millions of tweets that pour into the micro-blogging site each day.
Three apps in particular make the experience richer, especially if you’re using Twitter to discover new content and augment your time on it with new features. Twitdom, for example, is an ‘app store’ featuring apps that work with Twitter.
At the moment, the site claims to have more than 2,300 apps — which mean pretty much whatever you’re looking for is bound to be available.
For the others: meet SnapBird, which is a search engine built to comb through tweets and help you find what you’re looking for.
It is more specific than Twitter’s native web search, and also lets you search through the tweets of someone who’s not following you. On the downside, SnapBird doesn’t let you access the public timeline.
Another useful app is InTweets. It works like TrapIt, but fishes out stories from Twitter based on your interests. Used well, this is perfect for following news from your favourite, bands, brands, etc.
InTweets, Twitdom and SnapBird are all web-based apps.
