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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Photo Editing Web App: A Review of Picnik

I've been using the Picnik web app for that past week or so for editing my photos (thanks to @KateMontgom for the tip). Been quite enjoying it, and here's why.

Firstly, its free, and there's no need to download any app. It even installs into Chrome if you want it to. Works on Windows and Mac. Whoop! All good so far. I love the easy integration with other photosharing sites and social networks (more on that later)


If you register (yes, its still free at this stage) you can upload 5 photos at a time, otherwise if you are happy with one at a time then you can continue to use without registration.

Its very simple and easy to use thanks to the friendly interface and has some good features and effects.

Different effects applied to the same photo

Here is an example of the original photo with different effects applied: Cross Process, Color Focus on B&W, Neon. And there are heaps and heaps more, all with the click of your mouse.

There are touch up features available as well, such as blemish fix, red eye, teeth whitening and my favourite .....'Insta- Thin'. Talk about Insta-Win!

You can also adjust the exposure, highlights, colour, contrast, crop, resize, sharpen, many of which have an 'auto' setting to correct your photo in one click.

Within each effect there are lots of options to allow you to change the end result, eg brush size, fade percentages etc all controlled using sliders like the ones shown below.


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