Review: iSwarm
Score:
45%
iSwarm is an application that might seem superfluous to many, but for others it will be a vital tool in their online world. Developed by Ceiba Solutions, it sets out to look over the major social networks for set phrases, alerting you when they are mentioned online. Anyone monitoring a campaign or PR'ing for a product should be interested. Unfortunately, iSwarm is little better than a saved search on each service.
Version Reviewed: 2.5.0.0
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iSwarm's goal, and a key aim of the app, is to "monitor what matters". Unfortunately, the way the app presents your large lists of phrases, gathered over multiple social networks, makes for a rather unwieldy process.
And it all starts so well. Opening up and registering your account, you'll be shown the main menu, and an overlay to show you the workflow. Set up a social media channel by logging on and authorising iSwarm to use it (and your options here are Twitter, Facebook, Google, or YouTube). Then you can set up your watch list of terms that you want to monitor over the networks. These could be your own name, a hashtag, a product, or key trigger words that you need to watch out for.
Functionally, this works well, but I have some issues over the presentation. I would really have liked the app to use a smaller font to get more information on a single screen. As it stands, just three short status messages or tweets before I have to start scrolling makes it hard to use iSwarm for a fast moving topic.
I'd also like to see much more flexibility in setting up the watchlists. While you can list a word or phrase, and as long as one of these words appears in a message it will be highlighted, I would have preferred a few more operations, perhaps an AND or an OR operator to create something a bit more complex and useful. It's a fast moving world out there, and while iSwarm promises to catch everything, it's still going to be relying on you doing a lot of scrolling and monitoring of the application to see it all.
Which kind of defeats the purpose of the app.
That feeling of not doing enough is compounded when you do find a message that you need to reply to. Rather than open the clients on your Windows Phone handset, the app will open up a web browser instance that fills just two thirds of the screen, hoping you can log in to the service and reply from the mobile web page version that is now rendered far smaller than it needs to be.
This is not a graceful solution, and all the effort put into the interface is lost. There's no point working with faux live tiles in iSwarm's menus, panoramic screens with the right fonts and headings, and then drop the ball when it comes to deep linking into the applications on the handset.
iSwarm's pitch is a compelling one - to have a set of words and phrases you can centrally manage that will be monitored over a number of social networks. But the list of networks is still too small. Facebook and Twitter are givens, but I struggle to see why YouTube is there - surely somewhere like Reddit would be far more useful and be a sensible place to watch out for your chosen words and topics being mentioned?
Here's the simple thing - there is more flexibility in the search box in the client apps on Windows Phone than there is in iSwarm. I can see an argument that, when you have multiple terms to watch out for, iSwarm is faster and easier to use, but with a limited view on search results it feels like a false economy.
I want to see this idea work, but if the answer is to be iSwarm the developers need to head back to the drawing board to work on a solution that fits in with real world needs, and makes best use of the environment on a mobile device.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at