Social Stream
Really more of a social trickle
Free Developer My Social Stream, mysocialstream.com Platform iPhone Requirements iOS 9 or later
Social Stream is an app that promises to suck up all your social media accounts and spit out an aggregated feed, tailored to what you want to see.
No more will you have to scroll through endless posts about Minions from your distant relatives to get to the stuff about your childhood friend’s messy divorce; no more will you have to piece together the day’s news from what people are angry about on Twitter. Social Stream, as its name implies, wants to streamline your social media experience in one app.
Unfortunately, it didn’t work for one of our team. Not just that it didn’t match up to what it promised – it just plain didn’t work. Even after connecting all the social media accounts it would accept – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube – it never loaded them. The app told us during setup that it “…may take a couple of minutes if you are very popular. If this is instantaneous, we suggest you need to make more friends.” That’s kinda rude, but given that it was seemingly taking days to load, it didn’t apply in our case. Clearly you can be too popular for your own good. The setup process did work for another member of the Mac|Life team, so we got it up and running eventually, but that kind of inconsistency isn’t exactly ideal.
Other parts of the app were hit and miss, too. Posting to Facebook wasn’t working during our time reviewing the app (but the developer was working on it). It’s also just strange that every update that appears in the timeline has a space for an image, meaning that tweets or Facebook statuses that are purely text come with a large placeholder stock photo just taking up room on the screen. On top of that, the text size in the updates is needlessly small.
You also miss out on certain features, such as conversation threading in Twitter: a post that appears in your aggregated feed might be from the middle of a series of tweets, but you can’t easily see it in context. You can customize your feed, to show more or fewer ads, more media posts or more friend posts, and either organize them by most popular or most recent. It sounds useful, but the effectiveness of a small movement on these sliders isn’t exactly easy to gauge.
Social Stream seems like it could be a useful way of having all your social media feeds in one place. There are even easy ways to like, comment and reply within the app. It’s just a shame that it wasn’t a compelling experience even when it worked.
the bottom line. Shallow features, design issues, and tech problems mean this falls short of its social media promises. Let’s hope some improvements are on the way.