Review: Zensify for the iPhone / iPod Touch

Zensify 1.2.3

Reviewed on a iPod Touch 1G

If you’re very active on the internet, or social networks to be even more general, how do you manage all of the social networks you may be a part of? The social networks I visit daily include the following: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, and Delicious. That’s six social networks right there. Typically, I personally just have a lot of internet browser tabs open.

But the thing is, I’m on these social networks to get the latest content (for me, that’s mainly tech related) and also to get it contact with all of my good friends. As of right now, there are applications out there to help you out with this. But none of them, except for Zensify, brings all of that content and pulls it together into one; it’s really a social network aggregator, or collecting all of that information and putting it into one!

One great thing about Zensify is for the fact that it has a lot of built in social networks. In Zensify, they include the following social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Digg,Delicious, Photobucket, and 12seconds. They’re all quite easy to set up; all you need to do is type in your username and password for the given social network. Because there are so many networks, it may seem to be laggy at times. Give Zensify time to download everything. What I would personally think is let Zensify download everything before the user interface is shown (the splash screen). This would make it so the application would not lag if the user was tapping on a lot of things. I know it’s download things when the user interface is loaded because I have the spinning circle at the top of my screen.

When you first set up Zensify, it walks you though a tutorial on how to navigate through the application. After the tutorial is finished, Zensify asks you if you want to finish or either to never show the tutorial again on startup; you can go back to the tutorial if you need to. What’s really not needed is the “Do not show again” button. I personally understand why it’s there, but when the user completes the tutorial, they really don’t need to see it again. I would personally make “Do not show again” automatic, and if the user needs it, they can go back to it in the “You” tab at the bottom. At first, I clicked finish, and noticed it came back up when I ran Zensify for the second time.

Because Zensify does rely on a current internet connection, speeds may vary in Zensify. For me, I found the application to be very fast for how much content it needs to download. The only thing is, if you run the application without any internet connection, it will popup a message saying you don’t have a internet connection, but it pops up that message two times! The user will only need to know that one time. Also when you’re adding your details for Facebook and Flickr, Zensify opens up a internet browser for you to enter your details in. It would be nice if that was not done via a web browser.

One of the key features is that Zensify allows you to save the tags you were looking for. Say if you are a business and you want to know everything that’s happening on the web about your business, you could save a track for you to search for it later. This for sure helps you keep in touch with the latest news. What would be nice is that if you would be able to set a custom picture for your track also. This isn’t documented in Zensify, but like in any application, you are able to swipe your finger the the left to delete your track.

The search is one of the cool features of Zensify. In the search tab, yo'u’re able to search for tags, social networks, usernames, and also content types. In the search, as you would expect, Zensify combines all of your social networks you have added into the application into one search result. You can also see the latest tags at the top of your screen by flicking your finger through them. It would be nice if you would be able to search for a specified content on a single network, AKA, a advanced search. I know you’re able to do this already (with something like “*facebook Tech Cores”) but it would be nice to have a visual advanced search.

The tracks is probably one of the most important parts in Zensify. You’re able to look at your social networks individually, and also look at a specified content type in all of your networks. You basically have the power to browse through all of your social networks with the tracks.

The topics tab is what really makes Zensify awesome! In the topics tab, you are given a whole page filed with a lot of the popular tags that are being talked about through your social networks. You first click on one tag, then you will retrieve the sub-tags for the tag you picked. Then you simply click on the menu icon at the upper right of the screen to get the results for the first tag  you have picked. Or you can click on one of the sub tabs and bring a list up that way. No matter what you’ll do, you will be given a list of the latest topics talked about on your social networks. It would be really nice if this would be more of a 2D interface though. For example, if there were really small tags (would be the “unpopular” ones), you could use your two fingers to zoom in on those and click them to get their sub-tags.

When your at the home tab, it displays all of the notifications from your social networks you have added. The bad part about this is that this list can build up very quickly. It would be nice to see a options menu for the user to be able to customize their home tab a little more. For example, limiting the notifications to the latest X amount of notifications, specifying what networks the user wants to see, the type of content, the type of users they want to receive notifications from, and everything else.

And of course, you can post updates to the social networks you have added to Zensify! And yes, the status was added to my Facebook and Twitter account.  :)

Overall, the people who have worked on Zensify must have put in a lot of thought into this application. I would like to see more customizable options though. Customization is a key (especially on the home tab) feature for the user to be able to customize the content they see (other than what networks they add-on). I understand Zensify combines all this information into one, but it would be nice to customize that even more. You guys took social networking to the next level, but I honestly think you can do even better! Great job on Zensify, and I hope you will work on to expand Zensify even more. It would be even better if you could take this application, and turn it into a Windows, Mac OS X, and maybe even a web-based application!

Pros:

• Connects all of your social networks together
• Able to search through your social networks in a variety of ways
• Great user interface
• Able to post updates to all over your networks
• Organize your search with a lot of different features
• A great interface (topics) to see the latest talked-about tags
• Add custom tracks and save them off for later use.
• It’s free for now!

Cons:

• The application speed will vary for every application; can be slow at times, but is fast in general.
• The web browser for adding in your details for Facebook and Flickr. I know this might not be possible via their API’s, but it would be nice to not have a web-browser.
• No ability to add custom-icons to your tracks you’ve added
• No user interface for a advanced search
• As of now, you are not able to zoom-in on the topics page to see the “un-popular” topics being talked about.

By the way, just in case you didn’t know this, a “tag” is another name for a “topic”.

I rate Zensify a 5/5 because I absolutely love the features Zensify has that no other application has. I'm going to keep my iPod Touch more in  pocket just because of this! I love the fact that now it's possible to combine all of the social networks just in your hand!