Trying to pack all the websites you’re subscribed to in a single application isn’t a new concept at all. Apps like Socialite for Mac and Ego for iPhone have successfully managed to integrate the most popular social networks in one single and easily accessible place, thus making really simple for people to take a look at what’s going on, what they missed and, overall, what’s new.
Sponge by Oobah Studios is a new application for iPhone which aims at collecting all your internet feeds in one screen, enabling you to catch up with the latest happenings on your various accounts. It’s very good, but it might use some adjustment and fixes. Read on to find out what.
First, the current version of Sponge (1.2) supports the following websites: Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Youtube, GMail and Flickr, and the developers already announced support coming for Tumblr, Atom and Google Buzz. Sure it would be great to see Delicious, Pinboard and Read It Later entries implemented, but it’s a damn good start nevertheless. To start adding new “internet feeds”, just tap on the + button and you’ll be able to choose from the supported services. The system is straightforward and rather fast, I’ve been able to add my services of choice in less than a minute.
And this brings us to the main screen of Sponge, where you’ll see all your feeds and unread counts in the shape of different colored tabs. You can tap on a feed to check what’s new (be it Gmail or Twitter, or Flickr too) and see the unread count fall down as you read stuff. The concept itself it’s simple and great, but I have some gripes about the realization I can’t help but mention. First, Gmail is rendered through the web interface which doesn’t really fit with the app’s UI and feels irrelevant and out of place. If that’s the price to pay to have a GMail feed, please remove it guys. Then, RSS Feeds: there’s no “mark all as read button” at all. This means that when I added MacStories feeds into the app (a very cool thing is that you only need to enter the website URL and Sponge will automatically retrieve the feeds address for you ) Sponge fetched the latest 200 items, and I still have them there because I don’t have time to enter every single feed to mark it as read. Seriously?
The built in Twitter client is quite nice though. It supports the now popular “pull to refresh” gesture, and allows you view a single tweet, reply to people and well - yeah - tweet. Ok maybe it’s not a real “client”, but at least it lets you tweet. A nice addiction anyway. Support for Flickr and Youtube is nicely implemented too, but I haven’t tested the Facebook one, as I don’t use FB that much.
All in all, Sponge it’s a promising app with some drawbacks that hopefully will be fixed in a few updates. If the developers will keep adding features, refining the UI (which is already beautiful, not to mention the icon from Sean Martell) and keep bugs under control, then Sponge will be one of the best networking app for iPhone of 2010. Until that time, you can trust the devs now and go buy the app for $1.99 in the App Store.
