Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you will be aware that location based Check-In services are the latest and greatest aspects of social networking. This is highlighted by the new Facebook Places service. GetGlue isn’t your average location based Check-In service, in fact it doesn’t feature your location at all, though it does have Check-In and it’s highly addictive.
To begin, getglue.com should be your first stop to find out more about the service and set up an account before downloading the app. But here’s a quick overview; instead of checking in to your current location you check in to what you’re currently doing specifically with categories such as T.V. Film, books, topics, music and video games as well as a few others. If there is a book or program you can’t find, you can email GetGlue to ask them to add it. Also there is the ability to ‘Like’ or ‘Dislike’ any of the activities you can Check-In to. You can also earn stickers, kind of like FourSquare badges, the difference here though is if you earn 7 or more GetGlue will send you actual physical stickers per your request!! There are a few other little features on there but those are the biggies.
This is a review of the app though and not about the service so lets focus more on that. Functionality of the app is great, it does the main thing you need it for (Checking-In) very well, with options to post to Twitter and Facebook too. Also when it posts to Twitter it even includes a # tag! It also has a Stream tab which shows what your friends are currently doing and then underneath recent entries for everyone else. There is then a Rate/Pick tab, which I rarely use as there is no search function, which is very disappointing as I came to search for a film I had just watched so I could ‘Like’ it and there was no easy way to find it. Then there is a stickers tab which shows your earned stickers and then a few you can earn, though not how, cheeky! The last tab is ‘You’ which is access to your profile including subscriptions and subscribers, messages and everything you have ‘Liked’.
What disappointed me about the app though as the UI, it’s very basic, using Androids native tabs which I hate, I think they’re quite ugly. It could definitely be made to look a lot nicer, and hopefully with future updates they will improve it, but it does what it was designed to do even though it doesn’t look pretty whilst doing it.
Overall the service and the app are great. I found once I started liking things that I could think of off the top of my head, GetGlue started to give me suggestions of other things I might like, which I did and thus got more suggestions and I found I could keep on going ‘Liking’ things for hours. One other thing I have found though is that I don’t use the Check-In service for everything I’m watching, mainly because I don’t want people to get updates through Facebook and Twitter every half hour for the show I’m currently watching. I tend to check in and share with Facebook and Twitter with cool things that I want people to know I’m doing, or if they will earn me a sticker. Give it a try and let us know what you think in the comments section below, also if you want to subscribe to my updates my username is Ryan654 which incidentally is my Twitter username, I could always do with some more followers.
cool app …..
btw…added u on twitter
I agree with all, except one thing wasn’t mentioned (and probably due to your hardware vs mine), when you like out the keypad, like on a G1, the screen doesn’t rotate so you have to type with your head cocked to the left.