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The problem with social networks is that there are too many of them. You find yourself opening up a bunch of different network-specific apps on your iPhone all the time, and you probably wonder why you waste so much time jumping back and forth between them all. I haven’t always been the best of friends with Facebook, but I understand why it’s valuable. I also have no love for its iPhone app. On the other hand, I love Twitter and love a few of the Twitter apps available on iPhone. I always thought it would be great to be able to access Facebook through Tweetie on iPhone. Taptivate’s newest app, Friends, attempts to bridge the gap between Facebook and Twitter (along with LinkedIn and MySpace) in a Twitter-app-like interface that any iPhone Twitter user is probably pretty familiar with.
The goal of Friends is not just to mimic a Twitter-style UI for these four social networks, but to be a hub for all the information you keep about your friends. Your social network friends get tied to the contacts in your address book as well. You can mark them as a favorite contact and file them in a contact group from here. When you pull up a person in your address book (through Friends) and you’ll get tabs for the local contact info, Twitter profile, Facebook profile and a stream of all their messages together. You don’t have to jump around in the app to see everything. The downside to this is, if your friends post the same things to both Twitter and Facebook, you’re gonna get doubles of everything. This is something that I hope can be corrected later down the road, but I have my doubts. You can get one big list of all the posts from your friends across all social networks or you can select “Photos” or “Videos” to just see those types of content only. It’s a pretty handy way to filter out all the text-only posts and see just rich media. You can also edit and add contacts to the iPhone address book through Friends, and you can initiate phone calls, although I hardly see the point. It’s there though, and the dial pad UI is more attractive than Apple’s.
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As a Twitter client, it’s not bad. It’s not the power user app that Tweetie was, but it’s got all the major features, and I love how it handles linked pages in tweets. If you tap on a tweet with a link, it pulls that tweet up separately from the timeline and starts to load the linked page at the bottom of the screen. You can then flick up to load the page fullscreen, in-app. It reminds me of Twitter for iPad, and it’s the first time I’ve seen websites handled this way in an in-app browser. The app also sports Instapaper support for reading later.
If you use more than one of the social networks that Friends supports, it might be worth your while to check out the demo video on for Friends on Taptivate’s site. It’s a beautiful app with all the basic functions of the supported social networks. It’s a very good Twitter app and a decent Facebook app. It has pretty much everything that Twitter supports aside from lists, but you can only register one account. It lets you see your Facebook news feed and post to it, but you’re not going to be chatting or checking out your Facebook groups. These are all things that may or may not be added in the future, but for now Friends has enough of the functionality of these social networks that it’s a worthwhile purchase. You can get it in the App Store, for $1.99.
