SocialScope is the ultimate app for social networking butterflies that prefer to flock with BlackBerry. Although there has been talk of support for iPhone and Android devices, I've yet to actually see anyone use it or talk about it – so for the moment, it's enjoyed only by people unknown to me. Why might that be? Oh, because SocialScope is still in private beta.
I requested an invite when I first got a BlackBerry handset, in July 2009, and received my invite in early 2010. Apparently I'm lucky, as beta invites are very scarce and there are those who have been waiting for more than a year already in the hopes of scoring one.
What makes SocialScope the ultimate app?
Only the ability to manage your (multiple) Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Flickr accounts, all in one place. The ability to update your status, across all these networks, simultaneously using your BlackBerry. No more individual (crappy, poorly-designed) individual apps for Facebook and the like. Just the one easy-to-use app jam-packed with useful features.
What makes SocialScope for BlackBerry Torch different?
Obviously the Torch has that whole touchscreen thing going on – so there's that. And that means that everything in the app can be touched, in order to access the content that lies behind that particular link.
It means that you can flick through your timeline and skim read tweets. It means you can flick across your various tabs (Twitter timeline, @mentions, Facebook timeline etc) and you can zoom in on anything that looks interesting. Previews of photos uploaded to Twitpic and the like appear in your timeline, and touching them brings up the fullscreen view.
There's also that whole shake-it-baby accelerometer thing, which means that you can view SocialScope in landscape or portrait, depending on how you're holding your phone, and you can tweet in either orientation as well. You can tweet without using the Qwerty keypad – an on-screen keypad pops up if the Torch's slide is shut – and it's pretty easy to use. I'm pleased to say that overall, the app runs extremely well on the BlackBerry Torch and it hasn't hung once and it barely ever lags.
The app is also more responsive because of the 3G connectivity of the Torch. Not to mention a faster processor and BlackBerry OS 6.
But what can it do?
Ah. The all-important question. The short answer is: it can do everything.
The long answer is: Okay, it can't really do everything. What it can do is act like a central hub for some pretty important (and much-used) social networks. Let's take a look at some of the more specific features.
It's a must for Twitter-addicts:
- Multiple account support, and it's easy to add/remove more accounts.
- Update your status, and choose whether or not to add pictures or video, from existing media, or launch the camera application. You can also add your location to status updates.
- Change your profile details and profile picture. If there's an ability to lock/unlock your tweets, I haven't seen it.
- View followers profiles, with an option to review their recent tweets – you can also manage your followers, and can unfollow/block anyone.
- You can also mute certain tweets/Twitter users – either for a certain period, or forever. You can choose to tell them of this fact, or not. Very handy.
- You can view and create lists. You can add tweets to your favourites or remove them and in the case of multiple accounts, it will prompt you for which account should be used.
- You can retweet – both in the "new" style, which is a verbatim/automatic tweet or you could quote that person's tweet, and add your personal comment to it, which is the "old" style of manual retweeting (copy, paste, comment) made much easier.
- There's a Reply-All function. Not to mention an auto-fill function that starts suggesting matches from people you follow once you type characters after the @ symbol. That suggests people from your Twitter and Facebook friends.
- Direct messages are easy to manage, as you can choose to have them in a separate tab on their own, or they can appear in your timeline marked in green. In your direct messages inbox, messages between you and your friends are threaded, making conversations easier to track. Replies and conversation threading works much the same in the main SocialScope feed, too.
- @mentions are marked in blue in your SocialScope feed, which makes them easier to spot, as you're cruising down the touchscreen with your thumb.
- Each different account you use is also assigned its own colour scheme. For example: in the main SocialScope feed, my @ExMi followers have a little blue Twitter symbol that appears next to their tweets, and the @GirlGuidesZA followers are marked with a little pink symbol, and those that are followers of both accounts have both symbols, overlapping.
- When replying to tweets or posting new ones, SocialScope will prompt you to select an account to tweet from, so you never have to (really) worry about a drunken tweet going through to your work Twitter account.
- You can also search Twitter, view trending topics, find tweets near you, shorten URLs and share tweets via e-mail.
- It really is about shareability: easily tweet links directly from the BlackBerry browser, or from your mail.
Finally, Facebook is bearable on BlackBerry:
- All of your Facebook friends' status updates will appear in the SocialScope feed with a small blue Facebook logo on the right, and there's also a separate Facebook tab.
- Manage all your Facebook mail - send and receive (it wasn't possible in previous versions to compose a new outgoing mail message, it was only possible to reply to incoming mail from other people.).
- Update your status: add a photo/link/location.
- Respond to friend requests. (Also something not possible in previous versions of the app.)
- Comment on Facebook posts by other people, Like, see wall-to-wall (ie: follow a public conversation) or Poke them.
- View read-more style previews of links posted by your friends, and see thumbnails of pictures they post, before you decide to click through.
- View posts made by Pages that you like, or Groups that you belong to.
- Manage your Facebook page. While admin functionality is limited for Pages, it's pretty handy being able to access all the posts and update status/add links/Like/share things directly through SocialScope.
Check-check-check-in with Foursquare:
- Using the Foursquare API, SocialScope uses your BlackBerry's GPS functionality to determine your location and lets you check-in to places quickly and easily – which means you'll be one step ahead in the fight to be mayor of Nowheresville.
- Find people, places and tags with easy-to-use smart search functionality.
- Mute people, so you don't have to be notified as they check into every single room in their house.
Flickr your friends:
- View photos and albums from your Flickr contacts.
- Upload photos directly in your status updates, to Flickr.
- Comment on your contacts' photos.
- View albums as a slideshow that you can flick through with a thumb (very cool!) .
As you can see – that's quite a list of powerful features and I doubt I actually managed to cover them all. With the constant updates notifications that I've been getting with the app lately, it's clear that the dudes at SocialScope have been working very hard. So much so that they seem neglected to respond to begs and pleas for more beta invites to be released, and still don't seem to be in any hurry to take SocialScope out of private beta yet.
After using SocialScope on a BlackBerry Curve 8900 for just over six months – and eavesdropping on other users' tweets about SocialScope – it seems that this is one of those apps that you either love or hate. Either you'll love the endless options and functionalities and the (vast) multiple account support across a your most-used social platforms, or you'll hate it for the clutter, preferring instead to manage each social network from a dedicated app.
Either way, I suggest you try it out for yourself. Chances are you're like me, and you'll wonder how you survived without it before. Once it's here and it's on the iPhone, and it's on Android devices and the like, the ease with which people immerse themselves in social networks will be alarmingly increased.
Get in line for an invite code, here.
