First you ‘liked’, then you ‘favorited’, now you ‘star’

Wading through the mountain of information shared on social networks every day can be an arduous task. So, sometimes the latest craze (probably involving cats doing funny stuff) passes you by and all you can do is look at your friends with blank faces when they mention it. Starlike is here to help by showing you only the content that your friends have liked on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Follow the stars

Starlike supports three of the main social networks in our lives – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, but not Instagram or Google Plus. Once you’ve signed in to any or all of these accounts you’re presented with a timeline of all the content that has been liked or favorited by your friends/connections/people you follow. You can ‘star’ these posts and it will show up as a like or favorite on the relevant social network. This seemed to be reliable when I checked back on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

At first, my timeline was filled with favorites from one of two people on Twitter and not much else. Once I’d muted these users my timeline improved significantly. Starlike lets you see loads of cool articles, pictures, and videos that you wouldn’t normally spot, and they are all in one place.

But, other than muting people, there aren’t any filters or lists so all the content from lots of very different people is presented in a single timeline. And there is so, so much information being liked or favorited every hour, never mind day, that it can be hard to sift through.

You can turn off and on your social networks, which helps, but it would be great to be able to categorize your contacts, a bit like the List feature on Twitter. For example, this contact on LinkedIn normally likes business posts so they could go under the ‘business list’, while another person usually favorites film-related stuff so they go in that list.

Lacking in star quality

Starlike needs some work on its usability. When switching on and off social networks or when opening and closing the app, it doesn’t always display the most recent content. Sometimes, when opening Starlike it would only show LinkedIn content even though all three social networks were enabled.

Three stars

Starlike is a concept that could have legs, but it needs some work on the execution and feature set. It has a place in the market, especially for anyone desperate to keep up with the latest trends but who doesn’t have the time to do it. My only question is: do we really need another social network app?