Price: Free Score: 8/10 Category: Social Media
Whims is for Words like Instagram was for Photos and has just been released on iPhone and Android. Why is Whims cool? the guys at Whims say it best on with “How you say something is as important as what you say.”
With the recent boom in social media sharing of photos it seemed that words were getting left in the dark. The days when Facebook statuses and Twitter updates mattered as much, if not more, than the images attached to them were slowly fading away. Enter Whims, a new social network that allows users to create and share more expressive, beautiful, and thereby more interesting status updates into photos by changing styling and typography.
Whims is different than other social media because it allows users to be creative with both the content and form of a message. Social media is a public medium, and when you share something on Facebook, Twitter and other networks, you want other’s to engage with the content you are contributing. Transforming simple updates into images extends the reach of your post because most social networks give preference to photos. There are so many users joining Whims that you can already find interesting people to follow on the Whims network, similar to what happened to Instagram.
Whims has a familiar layout, similar to that of Instagram which keeps the learning curve small. Besides the standard features such as your network, your profile and a spotlight of the most popular Whims, the main drawing feature is “Create A Whim” in the center of the menu on the bottom. On this page you can enter text, spaces, line breaks and other characters that you wish to be in your status update. When you hit ‘Save’ it takes you to the Whim editing page. On this page you can style your Whim from a collection of curated style sheets (named after popular fictional characters) with predefined color schemes. After choosing the style you can change between available fonts, change text size and alignment. Sometimes depending on what you do the styling it can turn out tricky, by making the line spacing to small you cannot select the text easily again. Overall the styling has a natural feel to it though, similar to Microsoft Word, but with less complexity. More style-sheets and combinations are to be desired, but the creators have made it known that there will be a library and submission feature included with later releases.
Once you create a Whim you can push it out to all the usual suspects such as Facebook and Twitter. The Whim itself is saved as an image on your phone and shared via text or uploaded to Instagram account.
Overall Whims is a great app and network with tremendous potential for growth and is already gaining the attention of some of the biggest names in the tech world. With some tweaks to the UI and a feature set provided by the app the Whims network has a chance of being what other’s are dubbing, the next Instagram.