When you see as many apps as we do at RWW, you begin to feel like it’s all been done. So many of the everyday jobs for apps to do can already be done by at least one app (if not dozens). How many ways can you share photos with your friends? How many social networks and check-ins and restaurant-discovery services do we need?
Lately, we’ve started to see a new class of app emerge just for managing these tasks across their various apps. The idea of apps for our apps sounds ridiculous, but some of them are neat, and some are downright lifesavers. Here’s a round-up of apps you should use if you want to bring your many social networks into one dedicated place.
Viewing Photos
A photo app called Pixable exists just to pull the photos from your Facebook and Twitter feeds into one attractive place. It allows further sorting of the photos into all kinds of categories, but its reach across social networks is what stands out. Pixable announced today that it reached a million downloads on iOS, and it also has a mobile Web version for users of other platforms.
Hopefully the creators will roll Instagram, Google+ and a few other services into this app. Then we’d only have to launch one app to see all our photos.
Videos
For viewing all the videos in your various social networks, Showyou is amazing. It brings any video from your Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Vimeo and Vodpod accounts into one sleek, sliding touchscreen theater (Vodpod is a video curation site by Remixation, the company that makes Showyou). Apple people can even AirPlay the videos over to their Apple TV from the iPhone or iPad version.
Showyou is available for iOS devices and the Kindle Fire. If this app appeals to you, stay tuned, because we heard through the grapevine that Showyou has something to announce pretty soon.
Files
If you need to find files that could be anywhere, Greplin can help. It logs into your Dropbox, Google Docs, Gmail, Google Calendar, Facebook, Twitter and more, and it lets you search all of them for the thing you need. Check out our guide to Greplin for more details.
It’s available for the iPhone as well as on the Web at Greplin.com.
Places
If you’re like most Americans, you might not get the point of location apps. The point should be to find cool stuff going on around you. But there are so many of these location apps, it’s impossible to know which one to use. That’s where Localscope comes in.
It’s a browser for the real world. It lets you search or browse across pretty much every Web service that shares public location data, and the interface is easy. You just click side to side between Foursquare, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Bing and more.
You can get Localscope for the iPhone or webOS.
Do you use any other apps for dealing with too many apps? Share them in the comments.