Weekly App Review #4
Thoughts on new apps I have used for the past week
Facefeed—(Free)—(8/10) — After seeing Gary Vaynerchuk tweet about Facefeed, I was interested to see what the experience was like. Gary is always ahead of the curve in adopting new apps and I was excited to use use the app. The walkthrough of the app was very descriptive and it was easy to set up. The app is quite simple. You do not have a profile but rather you take a selfie and that is all that other users see. After taking your selfie, you can go through your feed and see other people’s pictures. If you are interested in chatting, click the reply icon to send a message and take your selfie. The interactions are as simple as it can get. However, that doesn’t mean I will use them. At first, I was very hesitant to interact with people. What do you say to someone that you just see their face. Send them a hey? An emoji? It’s just plain awkward. However, after pushing myself to send a few, I got some hilarious responses, which made me realize that the app is in such early stages. Everyone is still testing it out and there is no downside in sending these messages. What I thought at first was awkward and weird soon became normal in my mind. Additionally, after showing it to a non-tech friend, he thought it was a funny concept and he downloaded it immediately. I even ran into my roommate who was playing around with the app with a friend.
The one part of the app I am slightly confused with is the ranking/popularity system. On a tab in the app, you can see how popular are compared to other users of the app. This ranking is based on how many messages you have received and sent. I do not understand why this is a necessity to the app. I don’t feel that it made me send more messages. It would be as if Tinder had a ranking system for how many people you matched with. Is it really necessary?
There is definitely potential with Facefeed and I believe that the users will choose the direction in which the app will update itself as they utilize it in various ways. Until then, I will continue sending emojis.
YikYak—(Free)—(5/10) — After reading about YikYak on Techcrunch, I was more interested to see the value in location based anonymous sharing as opposed to the college crowd that the app currently focuses on. I feel that the YikYak model of sharing to people within your geolocation has a lot of potential but it is difficult without enough users in the early stages. I have not seen one secret shared in the past two days. I believe this is due to the fact that they are launching campus by campus using campaigns to drive signups and they have yet to reach the Tri-state area. Although I did not see many messages, I was excited with regard to what I saw with the location. After clicking on a secret shared, you have the option to Reyak it, comment and see the exact geolocation where it was shared. This gives the user looking at it such great context knowing that it came from Washington Square Park for example. What types of secrets do people share depending on their location? Is there a correlation at all? At the moment, I don’t think I will become a regular YikYak user but I will keep it on my phone and come back to it every week or so to see if it has gained some traction.
Trusper —(Free)—(4/10)— I found Trusper through Product Hunt and downloaded it immediately. I believe in the potential of apps in which people can share tips and feel that it is not an area that has been solved yet as Youtube owns the market. Setting up my interests was very easy. After doing this, I was taken to a nice feed of user’s tips. However, majority of them had 0 relation to anything I was interested in. Many were health and wellness tips, which I checked off but they were primarily targeted at woman. This was a bit perplexing. After playing around for awhile, I found a few good tips but there were far too many that did not have anything to do with my interests. Perhaps putting in a few more options or questions such as gender or age would be useful in getting more relevant tips.
