RapidFire Update Status and Pictures on Multiple Social Networks at Once
by Toni McQuilken
Jun 1, 2011 4:31 PM –
Install
Rapidfire. This is an android app that gives you the power to send your message and picture(s) to multiple social networking websites in one-click.
Price: Free
Tested on: MyTouch 3G Slide
Content Rating: Everyone
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Post status updates to all your social networks in one shot
Cons
- Limited to a small handful of social networks right now, although the dev is updating it with new ones fairly frequently
Features:
Rapidfire is an app that allows you to update all your social networks in one place, at one time. As of this writing (there was an update to the app adding more networks in the middle of the review, so the developer is actively adding more) the networks you can add to the app are: Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Identi.ca, Last.fm, and MySpace. Once you authorize the account in the app, you don’t have to go in and add it again each time.
One think I really like is that, although you have all your social networks in the app, you don’t have to update to all of them every time. You can go in and decide by checking or unchecking each network which ones you want to use, making it a much more powerful tool for, say, separating work and personal accounts with different messages, but still having the convenience of using the app to post.
In addition to status updates, you can also post images to your networks from the app, which is a very nice bonus. There are options to either snap a picture with the camera or use one in your gallery. Unfortunately, in my tests, even though I could snap a picture and would hit “okay” to use it, for some reason the app kept defaulting to only using the RapidFire icon. I had better luck with the images in my gallery, and was able to upload those just fine to the network of choice. For uploading images to Twitter, you can choose from two services, YFrog or Mobypicture.
Because this is just to post updates and images to social networks, it doesn’t fully replace dedicated apps. You can’t get friends’ status updates, or, beyond a confirmation that your post was sent, see any followup to anything you post from this app.
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Rapidfire Networks
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Rapidfire Select Networks
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Rapidfire Post
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Rapidfire Twitter Services
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Rapidfire Settings
Usefulness:
If you use several different social networks, trying to keep them all up-to-date can be difficult. This app makes it quite a bit easier by allowing you to update several or all of your networks at one time, making it a real time-saver.
Ease of Use:
It was very easy to add networks, although it did take me several tries to get Facebook to authenticate. Posting status updates is as easy as hitting a single “fire” button. Accessing the rest of the options is all done via on-screen buttons. I would have liked to have the option to use the phone’s menu button to bring up some of them as well, but hitting that doesn’t do anything within the app.
Frequently Used:
This depends on your use of social networks. If you’re posting updates to them frequently, and use more than one, then this is an app you’re going to use all the time.
Interface:
The interface is a bit cluttered, with an ad, plus all the graphical buttons, then if you add any images, you’ll see thumbnails of those too. But there is a decent amount of space to type your status update, and it’s easy enough to figure the rest out that you can forgive a bit of clutter.