We’ve seen plenty of photo based applications on the App Store as well as a boatload of social networking variants, some of which are worldwide successes like Instagram and Facebook while others are more niche and used by only a select few. The Blurtopia iPhone and iPod touch app that recently landed in the App Store seems to be an amalgamation of a few genres but prefers to differentiate itself by being the application that can help us answer life’s questions with the help of an active and engaged community.
The main purpose of Blurtopia is to allow users to explore life’s questions without having to do it alone. The application itself acts as a mobile question and answer community with other users always on the other end to comment on images and provide timely and constructive feedback about whatever it is that is posted. The developers of the app have decided to call these questions "blurts" – hence the name of the app – and have broken the blurts down into three different post types available to users.
When posting a blurt, the user can opt to tag in either this/that, rate 1-5, or thumbs up/thumbs down, categories that are used to determine the type of response required from the community. Photographs from the device camera roll or the embedded camera can be added to the question as well as deciding whether or not the question should be visible to just connected friends or to the whole Blurtopia community.
The whole app is geared around a chat system that is designed to try and keep the conversation flowing and encourage users to interact with one another over the blurts that have been posted. Conversations are threaded to make it easy to keep up with what’s been said and in what order. The idea of a socially connected question and answer community is a great one but it would be nice to see it opened up a little more rather than shackling freedom by limiting the type of question that people can ask. Time will also tell if a community like this will require any kind of moderation.
(Source: Blurtopia for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store).
Be sure to check out our iPhone Apps Gallery and iPad Apps Gallery to explore more apps for your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.
You can follow us on Twitter, add us to your circle on Google+ or like our Facebook page to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google, Apple and the web.
