Alamgam

Alamgam Review

by on January 11, 2013

Twitter and Facebook are so entwined as everyday web services, we wish they were one network most of the time. Since the bosses of these two social network giants are never going to let that happen, it falls to apps like this make it a reality.

Amalgam provides one feed for all your tweets and Facebook updates, making it all look like it comes from the same source. The obvious benefit is that you no longer need to swap between the separate apps or websites, so you’re less likely to miss something if it’s all in one place. The potential downside is that if you follow a lot of people and have a large number of Facebook friends (oh, you lucky thing), your feed will simply be unmanageable. Amalgam tries to address this with a split view so you won’t miss Facebook comments.

All tweets and Facebook posts appear in the news feed, albeit with different options under each one. This is dealt with quite smoothly, but the app’s attempt at minimalist goes too far; so much space is wasted, space that could have been used to display a gallery of Facebook images from friends as small thumbnails, or perhaps a search facility to direct you straight to a Facebook friend or someone you follow on Twitter. The developers told us that soon all mentions and notifications will be added to the feed and other networks such as LinkedIn and Pinterest should arrive in an update by the end of the year.

Amalgam, as it stands, is user friendly, but there’s no real flair to the design and the low resolution Twitter and Facebook icons look amateurish. We also had a lot of crashes in version 1.01. The potential in this app is there as a first port-of-call for social networking on your iPad, but it needs a lot more work.

Download this app: Amalgam for iPad

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Review courtesy of Tap!