TalkOver – an Instant Messenger app to Connect with Friends
by Toni McQuilken
Mar 13, 2012 10:41 AM –
Install
TalkOver is a real-time messaging service designed to provide a fun, interactive way to communicate with friends anytime, anywhere. It enhances the experience of connecting one-on-one and in groups with friends by allowing users to share videos, pictures and other content with their friends on the fly. But TalkOver isn’t your average instant messaging service – we focus on the details and are proud to be the latest, most unique new form of chat.
Price: Free
Tested on: Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Content Rating: Medium Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Provides a way to not only chat with people, but share photos, videos and links.
- You can chat with groups, or start private chats with contacts.
- You link to your Facebook account for a built-in potential contact list.
Cons
- I’m not sure there’s anything here you can’t already do in Facebook.
- While there is a way to log in without Facebook, it’s pushed to the side – this isn’t meant to be a replacement for that network.
Features:
TalkOver is the latest app that is trying to “revolutionize” the way that people communicate. In this case, rather than base it off the newer social network forms of communication, the developers have chosen to go with what feels more like an IM group chat session. It has predetermined groups you can join and contribute to, or you can invite friends from Facebook to join you in the app, and share and converse with them directly.
There are some pros and cons here. On the pro side, it is a nice way to not only chat with people, but share photos and videos, and comment on them. On the con side, for the most part, unless you have a lot of friends also using the service, you’ll mostly be chatting with strangers. And, as anyone who has ever been to an open chat forum will tell you, things very quickly degenerate off-topic, often in very inappropriate ways. Not always, but sadly that’s the way the Internet tends to work.
Given the tendency of the chats (at least the ones I poked in on) to wander off in directions that have nothing to do with the topic at hand, I’m not sure what the real point of the app is. There were a lot of photos and videos posted as well, but the commenting seemed to revolve more around other things, with the media gallery being almost completely separate from the chat.
The app also pushes sharing the chat and/or media to Facebook quite a bit, and I have to wonder why, if you wanted to share it on Facebook and get comments there, you wouldn’t have just posted it there to begin with. There, you’ll have a conversation directly around the media in question, and the off-topic conversations will each be contained in their own Post/Thread, rather than jumbled together in an IM chat format. Heck, for that matter, if a chat is what you’re looking for, Facebook actually offers that as well, with people you already know, and who are probably the ones you want to talk to in the first place.
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TalkOver Chat
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TalkOver Active Chats
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TalkOver Feeds
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TalkOver Feed List
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TalkOver Media List
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TalkOver Media Interaction
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TalkOver Tutorial
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TalkOver Tutorial 2
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TalkOver Tutorial 3
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Talkover Facebook Permissions
Usefulness:
This is the category where I think TalkOver falls the most short. It’s not a bad app, but I really can’t see the usefulness of it at all. it doesn’t do anything Facebook doesn’t already do, and since it really only works well when tied in to Facebook, I have to wonder what the point is. I suppose if you’re looking to chat with strangers, rather than your friends list, this app could be useful, but I don’t know of many people who would prefer to chat with people they don’t know over those they do (that’s unless you’re trying to bring back the old Yahoo chat days?)
Ease of Use:
The app is actually very easy to use. It is laid out well, and it doesn’t take long at all to figure out how it works and what you can do. The developers did a good job here of making the whole thing very user-friendly.
Frequently Used:
Again, if you enjoy talking to random people, then I could see this app being used pretty frequently. However, if you prefer to chat with your friends, there isn’t anything this app does that you can’t already do in Facebook, so you probably won’t find yourself opening up TalkOver very often at all.
Interface:
As I mentioned above, TalkOver is actually very well laid-out. The interface is clean, and it is very easy to figure out what you’re supposed to do. There is also a tutorial that runs when you launch the app, with pop-up boxes that appear as you go to new sections, so even if you might not be able to figure it out on your own, the app does a good job of pointing out all the important parts.
Tags:
Android App,
Android Apps,
Android Tablet Apps,
AndroidTapp.com App Review,
Facebook,
Instant Messenger,
Social Chat,
Social Media,
TalkOver
Categorised in: Communication, Social
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