Track Facebook, Twitter, Flickr & Youtube Updates on iPhone
For your iPhone, there are plenty of apps in the App Store that enables you to get connected with your favorite social networks easily. There is Twitterific to access Twitter, the Facebook app to receive/send notifications from friends, the Youtube app to watch Youtube videos and NetNewsWire to read all your favorite RSS feeds.
Note that all of these are individual apps that only allow you to access one service at a time. But what about an app that can let you receive updates from all of these social networks all in one place?
Ziibii is an iPhone app developed by Zumobi that allows you to connect to various social networks and receive all the updates in one centralized place. Instead of loading several apps, now you only need one app to rule them all.
Ziibii currently supports Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and also has a built in RSS reader. One good thing about Ziibii is that it doesn’t require you to set up an account with them. You simply load Ziibii, sign in to the various services and receive instant updates for those services.
There are three main icons on the Ziibii main page – River, List and Settings. Let go to the Settings page first.
The Settings page is where you enter your login credentials and configure the settings for each service.
You just need to enter your login name and password to start receiving updates from your friend.
When you login to Facebook, it will prompt you to install the Ziibii app in your Facebook account. This is to allow Ziibii to retrieve your friends updates and notifications from your account.
Flickr
You are not required to login into Flickr. However, you can configure what and whose photos are retrieved from the Flickr server. The default option is for it to fetch the daily Interesting photos. You can also configure it to retrieve photos from a particular Flickr user or tags.
YouTube
There are plenty of video channels in YouTube and I am sure you won’t be interested in all of them. This is where you get Ziibii to retrieve videos from your favorite channels.
Web Feeds
Ziibii comes preloaded with several RSS feeds from popular sites of a different nature. You can easily tap on the feed to select it. You can also add custom feeds to the feed reader.
While most RSS feed readers require you to enter the feed address of your favorite sites, one good thing about Ziibii is that you can simply enter the site’s URL and it will automatically search and retrieve the respective feed address. This means that if you have forgotten MakeUseof’s RSS feed address, you can just enter http://www.makeuseof.com and it will automatically fetch the feeds from the MakeUseOf site.
Receiving updates
After you have completed the setup, now is the moment to check and receive updates from your friends. There are two views that you can use – River and List.
In River view, the background is a river and every item (updates/feed/videos/photos) will just float across the screen just like a raft on a river. At any moment in time, you can tap on the Pause button (on the top right-hand corner) to stop the motion or tap on an individual item to access its preview.
In the List mode, all the rafts are arranged in a list and you can swipe the screen to access the next list of items.
Whenever you see an update/feed/video/photo that you like, you can easily tap on it to see it in a new window. There are also options for you to retweet it or email the item to your friends or to view the item in a browser.
Currently, all the information on Ziibii is only one-way traffic, which means you can only receive, but cannot tweet, update your status on Facebook or upload videos or photos to YouTube and Flickr. If in the future the Ziibii development team can include these features, this will definitely be a great app.
Download Ziibii now (iTunes link).
Do you use Ziibii? If so, what do you think of it? How can it be improved? Do you use something better? If so, tell us about it.
(By) Damien Oh is an all-out technology geek who loves to tweak and hack various operating systems to make life easier. Check out his blog at MakeTechEasier.com where he shares all the tips, tricks and tutorials.
