Ok, I’ve been talking about this for a long time: how someone needs to come up with an application to allow you to skim through the various social networks we all participate in and present them in a polished interface that doesn’t limit you functionality-wise too much as to make the whole effort useless. Of course, Facebook is trying to become the ultimate conglomerator on it’s own by allowing just about anything to connect to it, and this works to everyone else’s advantage because Facebook is so large, sending updates to them can actually gain them new users…
Anyway, enter skimmer, an Adobe Air application developed by Fallon, a branding/marketing/development company that obviously has a very clear vision for these things. This application works very well, and it’s only in beta. And as the first Adobe Air application that I’ve used for more than 10 minutes, I have to say I’m pretty impressed. It works fast, doesn’t look like crap, and doesn’t bog down your computer like other alternatives out there…plus it has an absolutely gorgeous full-screen mode. It lets you tweet, update some info in Facebook, comment, and go directly to the page in question if you need more info. All very seamless.
True, it’s a bit limited at the moment as it only connects to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and Blogger, but as the app develops I’m sure they’ll be adding lots of other applications…at least I hope so!
The next step for this whole “social network” phenomenon that I love/hate will be a way to UPDATE all of these services in one go, instead of just pulling information from them. It’s tiring and a total, complete waste of time having to repeatedly update different services with whatever information needs updating.
