Review: Flowd

Score:
71%

Author: Digia PLC

Buy Link | Download / Information Link

Video review of Flowd

Flowd

Flowd is geared towards mobile, allowing you to set up your account on your mobile, through three basic screens (name, email and selected password) before you go to the unique selling point of Flowd, following your favourite musicians.

To start off, you are presented with the "hot artists" on the system, in a nice (albeit long) kinetic scroll list. And this is where you, unavoidably, hit Flowd's big problem. The bands in the system, with the best will in the world,  are not household names. I spotted four that I recognise (Atomic Tom, Evaline, Manowar and The Wanted, if you're interested).

   

But let's address the band population issue in a moment, because my first impression was that someone has thought about how Flowd will be received by those downloading the application for the first time. A lot of time has been spent on the new user experience, from allowing you to immediately add new artists, to being given the option of a tutorial once you finish the setup, to popping up hints that will appear (just the once) when you enter a new area of the application. It makes for a nice application where you feel, for want of a better term, loved and understood.

 

Flowd also has another advantage. It's one of the slickest implementations of a social network that I've seen on the Symbian platform. The main functions of the network are represented by five responsive icons along the bottom of the screen, and while there is a pause for data to be loaded when you switch (maybe, if it's within two minutes, you could use a cache of the data? - one for the developers?) , it looks great, the scrolling is smooth, the icons are clear and the default theme of blues and blacks, with bright text, is stylish and smart.

But where are all the bands? Where is all the information? This is an application for a social network that is in its early days, which means there aren't a lot of people or bands to interact with. This is partially mitigated by the option to send your status updates out to your personal Twitter and Facebook accounts, so Flowd is not a complete island of social data, you can get information out (which also will be tagged as coming "from Flowd" so there's a bit of subtle advertising going on for the network). That's vital, because Flowd, like any network, needs to get users providing it the specialist data from bands to fans.

 

There's no immediate big name band to get people attracted to Flowd, so I suspect that the team are banking on the bands carrying out a lot of their promotion. For each band that signs on, you have to assume they are going to be doing some direct marketing to their fans to go and download the application to follow their musical adventures - with Apple and Android versions also supported,  as well as the desktop focused website, there are no huge compatibility issues in simply saying on an email "go follow us on Flowd".

My concern with this approach is that the unsigned and indie bands that Flowd are looking for are very switched on to the power of social networks. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter (and MySpace, which is still important in this context, so don't giggle), and they know that locking in to a new and unproven system like Flowd is not in their best interest for a short term result. What's needed are some clear success stories from Flowd to give the bands a reason to use the system, which gives the fans a reason to use Flowd, which gives more members - and a nice feedback loop to build the network up.

 

So, summary time. From a technical point of view, there's very little wrong with Flowd, but I can't mark the application on just that. The whole ecosystem needs to be examined, and it's pretty immature at the moment. If you've got a band you follow that's using this system, then there's a lot more value than if you have to use it as a band discovery tool (which it's not optimised for). So the score of 71 needs to be inflated to 80-ish if you've got some affinity to bands like Atomic Tom, and dropped to around 63 if you're not looking for the brand new, unsigned bands that fill up the system.

-- Ewan Spence, June 2011.

 

Reviewed by Ewan Spence at 23:22 UTC, June 12th 2011