Review: iFob – more like iFlop

A good deal of bloggers predict that the future of social networking lies not in what’s offered via computers, but rather how things are offered via mobile phones. Recently, social networks made exclusively for mobiles have started to form up, with the aim of linking people nearby in a way that Myspace and Facebook couldn’t do well (Until recently, anyway.) One of those new networks is iFob, which tries to link people at the same hotspot together.

iFob’s original incarnation was as a Jailbroken app for Installer. Back then, I thought little of it since the people I knew were unwilling to jailbreak their iPhones, and I didn’t think the mainstream was different. Now that it’s a legit app, though, I decided to give it a try, and was supremely disappointed.

At the left, you find the main screen, where you enter all your profile information. This consists of the usual stuff like your name, email, etc. Of course, entering all of this is extrordinarily tedious on the iPhone, due to the size limits.

So, after a ton of pressing glass, I was ready to go! Unfortunately, when I found a nice hotspot, nobody was around, so I just deactivated it and went on with my business in that area.

But when I got home, I found a nice suprise: ALL OF THE DATA I HAD ENTERED WAS DELETED!

All of it. I had to retype in every single damn thing into the program. Then I exited the program and went back in. Guess what? ALL GONE AGAIN. Furious, and avoiding the urge to post an iPhone destruction video on Youtube that would have made BlendTec’s blender bow before me, I uninstalled the application, only to (Guess what?) have the app returned upon my sync with iTunes (hence the Uninstall rant last Monday.)

For ingenuity, but real lack of competence, iFob gets 2 Generations out of 5. (See, I’m thinking like Apple, in Generations.)

Do you use iFob? Or is there something better? (I’d love to know.) Drop a line in the comments.