iRovr - Social networking done right, exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch

The media’s fickle love affair with social networking has spurned MySpace in favor of Facebook, and now Twitter, with a little LinkedIn on the side. Each of these social networks has enjoyed some level of success either by focusing on one market, or by doing at least one thing very well. Also, each of these started as a desktop web application before offering mobile access and only a handful deliver a true iPhone interface. There is one problem with these iPhone versions in that they feel more like an afterthought, created for the sole purpose of riding the iPhone media frenzy to get some press. Take the iPhone versions of Facebook and LinkedIn, for example. They are feature-crippled compared to their desktop siblings which makes the overall social networking experience for mobile less than satisfying. Yet quietly, deftly, iRovr has been building up an iPhone-only social network that leaves all the others sitting in the dust. Simply put, iRovr is fantastic and laden with features for blogging, life streaming, sharing photos and videos, social bookmarks, and polls. iRovr has everything we need in a social network, and more. Read on to learn more about iRovr for iPhone and iPod touch users.

We unintentionally spent a great number of hours using iRovr over the weekend due to it’s incredibly addictive nature. iRovr is simple to set up and get going, and before long, we found ourselves connecting with so many nice iRovr users that it was indeed difficult to put down. The iRovr community is varied in its demographics yet all the users have one thing in common, an affection for the iPhone or iPod touch. This one common thread binds the iRovr community together and serves as an ice breaker when connecting with new people.

When you sign into iRovr you are dropped into the main public stream. In iRovr, a stream is a metaphor for all the activity under a particular topic. Everything that gets posted will also appear in the public stream unless it is flagged as private. The public stream gives you a window into all the public activity currently happening in the community. You can also create your own streams and choose to make those public, or private by invitation only. Think of the public stream as being similar to the public update on Twitter, except that unlike Twitter’s text-only content, iRovr’s streams can contain photos, videos, polls, and links, in addition to text updates. You can easily filter what is displayed on this page so if you want to just view images, or just view blog posts and videos, you can do so by tapping the media type icons to turn them on and off.

Updating iRovr with new content is done via email which means that you submit content by sending an email to a specific email address at iRovr. This is a feature designed to make the iRovr experience easy on the iPhone and iPod touch. Email must be sent from the address that you registered in your profile. You can use iPhone’s built-in Mail.app for this purpose, or any web based email client as long as the return address matches your profile address. You can even update iRovr from your desktop email client which makes typing so much easier. Comments to streams are made directly within iRovr so you don’t lose the context by having to pop out to your email client.

Your iRovr profile page is where you manage your friends, blog, photos, bookmarks, videos, favorites, and comments. Other users can add comments to any item that you post which instantly turns it into a topic of conversation. As you add comments and share media with the community, your profile page will be updated so that you can easily find anything that you have shared in the past. Users can even comment on your profile itself where you become the topic du jour.

iRovr has many other great features worth mentioning here. In addition to updating your avatar photo, you can also choose from a number of pre-made themes to change the look of your profile. You can also upload your own themes and share them with the community. You can view your friends list at any time, see who’s currently on, and even look at the most popular topics. iRovr is also interested in growing its community globally by providing language options for English, French, Dutch, and Spanish. Setting one of these options will filter your streams to show only posts in that particular language. There’s even a handy help system built-in that displays hints to you when you need them.

If we have anything negative to say about iRovr, it would be more of worry than an actual nit. We know that the success of a social network depends on a critical mass of adoption by users. It’s the simple law of online communities, the more users it has, the more it attracts. With iRovr so focused on the niche iPhone demographic, we worry that it has painted itself into a corner that will limit its adoption rate because it is dependent on iPhone growth. Then again, maybe that’s a good thing because large social networks do come with more baggage in the form of spam, predators, and just overall noise. For now, iRovr has the feel of a quaint little town where everyone is friendly and you feel safe. This is in great contrast to the big city social networks like MySpace and Facebook. We hope iRovr continues to thrive and doesn’t become a victim of its own success. You can help preserve this community by donating to its creators via PayPal. All donators get to sport a nice little ribbon on their profile avatar to let everyone know they care.

When we returned to the offices on Monday to get back to work on our desktop computers after putting our iPhones down, we quickly began to miss iRovr. Having our iPhones out next to our computer was almost too distracting and gave us headaches when changing our visual focus from the big monitors to the small iPhone screen, and back. Then we discovered iPhoney, a pseudo iPhone emulator for the Mac that loads iPhone web sites into a simulated iPhone display for our desktop. This works perfectly for staying in touch with the iRovr community while we work, but you can also use Safari 3 on the desktop if you wish.

Clearly, iRovr was created specifically with the iPhone user in mind. The end result of this focus is a truly great experience on mobile Safari that outshines every other social network on the mobile device (yes, even those that have an interface optimized for iPhone). Online social networking doesn’t get much better than this. iRovr absolutely kicks butt, so go try it now and drop me a line when you get there. My iRovr name is “touchtip“, of course.

iRovr - The social network for iPhone and iPod touch
www.irovr.com