SocialPoint is an Android app that pools all of your social media accounts into one place and allows you to stay connected on your terms. You can use this to bring you Facebook, Google+, Twitter, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram, and AT&T accounts into one place. You can post to multiple networks at once, or choose which network you want to share your thoughts with, you can also do the same when searching for keywords, you can choose to filter out the content by social network. It’s an interesting concept and one that aims to mess the mess of social media apps we have installed on our devices, but can it really work?
To test it out for yourself, all you need to do is to download SocialPoint from the Play Store, and then create an account to get started. You can also sign up using your Facebook account if you’d like, but it’s often best to start afresh.
Once you’ve registered for an account, you’ll need to add some networks. You can choose from the vast list of networks to add in the “More” section from the bottom bar.
As you can see, there’s every major network and then some included here:
I’m pretty active on Google+ – well, more active than I am anywhere else – so I’m going to add my Google+ account.
I would have preferred the use of Google Sign-In here than a normal page like this as this required me to get a two-step authentication pin. Still, it definitely worked as I was able to see my Gooogle+ feed. However, things didn’t update as they would have done on the Google+ website itself.
I’m only really into using Google+, but if you’e a big user of practically everything, then SocialPoint can be a good way of bringing order to the chaos that is your online life. The Combined view is a nice way of getting a feel for everything at once across all connected networks.
Speaking of bringing everything together, SocialPoint also makes for an excellent contacts manager. It pools all of your contacts together from each network and allows you to filter through these by network.
SocialPoint brings order to chaos with the ability to search using keywords, you can further filter your search by choosing specific networks to search through, too.
A premium feature of SocialPoint is the ability to setup custom filters, like these for Tumblr, making it easier than ever to filter through the noise to the content you want to see.
SocialPoint is an excellent idea, and throughout my testing that’s what I thought of it, that it was a great idea, not necessarily a good app. It definitely works, and it does bring all of your posts together, but in my experience it’s not exactly smooth and there’s a lot of jankiness and I often found myself wanting to swap between different apps that worked as they should do rather than use this. That’s a shame, as the idea of SocialPoint is a powerful one. After all, I spend most of my time on Google+, but some of my friends use Facebook more than anything and it would be great to see those two things together with everything else. For those that have a little bit of everything in each network then this is going to really help. Features like Contacts are great for those that primarily use Facebook and the like to keep in touch with friends. It doesn’t matter which network you have this friend added on, if you have them all connected to SocialPoint, then you need this one app to find your contacts.
Ratings
- Speed (3.5/5) – Compared to their official counterparts, using networks like Twitter and Google+ just aren’t as quick or smooth. However, I realize the restrictive APIs and such aren’t helping much in that regards.
- Features (4/5) – This is a great idea, and SocialPoint makes it easy to add networks to your feed and the search features all work well, too.
- Theme (3.5/5) – SocialPoint is not a good-looking app, it’s far from being ugly, but it feels dated and has icons you’re more likely to find in an iOS app than an Android app.
- Overall (3.5/5) – The idea of bringing all of your social networks together in one place sounds great, but with such restrictive APIs from the likes of Facebook and LinkedIn, it’s never going to be as good as using the Facebook app for Facebook stuff.
Pros
- Helps cut down on swapping from app-to-app in order to connect with others online.
- SocialPoint can help bring the three big networks; Facebook, Google+ and Twitter together in one app.
- Contacts side of the app makes it easy to track down any of your friends, no matter how you connect with them.
- Search function allows you to search with keywords and choose which networks show up results, giving you the ability to filter out the noise from Twitter, for example.
Cons
- Needs a fresh coat of paint and a new UI to feel truly different.
- Doesn’t offer a better experience over using the official apps for each network.
SocialPoint is an excellent concept, it’s just a shame that it’s being held back by restrictive APIs from the likes of Facebook and Google+. There’s only so much that SocialPoint can do with this sort of limited access and as a result it’ll always be a better experience using the official Facebook app than using SocialPoint, which is unfortunate as the promise of clearing out the clutter and stop switching from app-to-app sounds really appealing.