Use Apps to Stay Connected

In today's technological world, social interaction has transcended the boundaries of phone calls and desktop computing. Applications for smartphones allow anyone to share location data instantly, spread news or personal information among a multitude of contacts, and find destinations in the nearby area and explore with friends. The ability to manage social media while mobile has presented us with an amalgam of ways to stay connected. Access our picks by simply searching for them on your device's app catalog.

Sharing locations and exploring

Foursquare

The Foursquare app for all major smartphones collects location data from your phone and uses it to let you “check in” at local venues or establishments nearby. You can read tips left by previous visitors to the location, and leave your own if you’ve got something to say.

Broadcastr

Broadcastr for Android takes a unique approach to GPS exploration, letting you to listen to voice clips that users have left at your location. You can record or listen to clips up to three minutes in length, and you can also “follow” users whose clips you have heard if you want to listen to more clips by them.

Google Latitude

Google Latitude provides users with a map that displays the location of all of their contacts using the app. Once Google Latitude is opened on a mobile phone, a user can see which friends are nearby, making it easy to meet up. But be aware that signing on to use this service means your friends can also see your location any time you have your GPS function active, so make sure they're friends in the classical sense, not just the facebook sense.

Sharing news and information

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck, a long-running Twitter client, has just debuted version 2.0 of its mobile release. Both Twitter and Facebook users can keep up-to-date with the people they follow in the form of a news feed. Twitter and Facebook feeds are merged into one, putting the news and status updates of any user’s friends all in the same place.

Listenr

Users of the social networking site Tumblr are now able to stream audio posts to their mobile phone using the Listenr app. Listenr lets Tumblr users log in and view audio posts from the contacts they follow, or add specific blogs manually to view all audio posts from one account at a time.

Spout

Separate from list-based feed streams, Spout offers a more visually pleasing way to access your followed sources. Facebook, Twitter, and Google Reader feeds are displayed in large, stylized text on your phone’s screen.

Finding local events

Patch

The mobile Patch app lets you access the same data from www.patch.com, but on your smartphone. It lists weather, events, and news from your area, all in the same place.

YP Mobile

Yellowpages.com recently acquired an event service named Zvents, making their mobile app a useful tool for finding local entertainment with your friends, along with other features like weather and a hotel finder.

Pulsd

The Android rendition of the local event site finds free and exclusive events in the largest cities in the United States, and offers all of the same accessibility as the full website version.

Social photography

Instagram

Instagram, a rapidly growing social app, allows friends to exchange pictures with a baked in sense of nostalgia by allowing the user to edit them with a variety of photo effects. It uses the iPhone’s camera to snap a picture and then instantly sends it to all of the user’s followers on the social networking sites they select.

PicPlz

PicPlz is Android’s answer to Instagram, and sports very similar features, including the ability to apply effect filters to your photos before you share them with friends.

TwitPic/YFrog

TwitPic and YFrog are both services that allow uploading and attaching pictures to tweets, so that followers are able to see a snapshot through a link within the tweet. However, TwitPic has recently been involved in a privacy issue concerning content agreements; TwitPic users currently must grant permission to TwitPic to use their photos however they would like in order to use the service.

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