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Oink Review: A Mashup of Foursquare, Yelp and Instagram

Example of a top rating in Oink

Kevin Rose (ex Digg) launched his new mobile app Oink in early November, so I gave it a whirl to see what all the fuss was about.

What is it? Well, its a way to rate things - different from foursquare where you are rating places. So for example: my favourite lunch haunt might have great salads, but the coffee may be horrendous. In foursquare, when you continuously visit the same venue you are subtly endorsing a location, but not necessarily all the things in it.

Oink gives you a different perspective by letting you rate things. At the moment, there is loads of food and drink being rated (dieters beware!), but also things like 11/11/11, or favourite planes, TV shows, movies or toys. If you are hunting down a good flat white, then Oink can help tell you where the nearest one to you is (good if you are travelling and not familiar with where you are staying). There are 4,268 coffee ratings in Oink already. That's a lot of coffee!

Example of the Oink feed

Oink lets you add photos and spruce them up using some Instagram-ish filters (although some improvement with the resizing of images would be good - some of my images were cropped beyond my control). Also I couldn't remove an item once it was added (even as the creator) so there could be a lot of housekeeping for someone to do one day....!

You can also tag the rating with a topic or category - and that allows you to score 'cred' in that category as your rating receives more Oinks. Comments and To Dos can be added to any rating too.

As with other social apps, you can follow others and good integration with your existing communities on Facebook, Twitter and foursquare makes this easy. Also by default you are following Kevin Rose and a few others in his startup company Milk which is a clever move - they are mad oinkers so very quickly you get a feel for what you can do with the application.

Summary - worth a look, will get better as more people use it in your location. And it will be interesting to see how retailers leverage this data in the future.

You can download it free from the AppStore for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch here

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