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A First Look At Yahoo! oneConnect For iPhone

Yahoo!’s oneConnect mobile application has been previewed before but was just released for the iPhone a few days ago. I wasn’t highly anticipating this app as I’m not a big Y! fan but I gave it a download regardless.

Off the bat, the application came across as very polished and I honestly wasn’t expecting that from Yahoo!. I don’t expect much from Yahoo! nowadays with all the things they try and don’t get right but I was pleasantly surprised to see their oneConnect application be pretty solid in its first iteration. Here’s a screenshot of my iPhone’s home screen with the oneConnect application icon, a derivative of the normal Contacts icon. (My iPhone has been pwned, thus the background picture.)

The oneConnect application’s goal is to be your hub for all social activities, connecting all other services you use to the Yahoo! information chasm. So far I’ve added my Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook accounts to oneConnect, and now updates from those three services show up in the “Pulse” section of the app.

I found that Pulse takes a little longer than other social feed apps to update, and scrolling is sluggish, but it’s a nice way to keep track of many things at once. Doing anything with individual Twitter posts beyond reading is worthless as tapping on a tweet opens up Twitter.com in mobile Safari, so I’m still using Twinkle for all my mobile Twitter needs.

One major feature I wasn’t happy with is the Contacts section of the app as I couldn’t get it working the way I thought it’d work. I figured that by syncing all my accounts with oneConnect, the Contacts area would then list all of my contacts across those services in a scrollable, alphabetized list, but it was always showing “0 Contacts” for me. I believe I have to download an external application and sync with that, but it should just work fine since it has all the information necessary to create such a listing. Oh well. Oh, and because I couldn’t get Contacts to work, I couldn’t get Favorites to work either as it relies on you to designate individual Contacts as your favorites. This is essentially what Friend Book did but since Tapulous pulled the app from the App Store and lost their head of development, I have no clue what the hell is going on with it. I was hoping that oneConnect would be the replacement but sadly I was mistaken, that is, until I can figure out how to get my Contacts to show up.

oneConnect is basically a status-checker for me at the moment, as the other useful parts of the service simply aren’t that useful to me overall. I can use Y! Messenger with it but I never use that service, and I was thinking of using it as a social Contacts manager but apparently I can’t use it for that either. Right now it’s doing a pretty nice job of social aggregation, so I’ll enjoy that aspect, but other than that it’s a dead brick. We’ll see how long it stays on my Home screen before wearing out its welcome.