Daps’em: A New iPhone App To Give Cross-Platform Shoutouts
By: Hillel Fuld
Every so often, a new trend in mobile apps is born. Some of the recent trends include location apps, photo editing apps, Twitter apps, and camera apps. A new trend I am noticing is “shoutout apps”. If you take a look at the way users act on the various social networks, you will see that whether they are using Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or something else, everyone likes to give shoutouts.
Someone did something nice for you, or accomplished something note worthy, people like to give them a shoutout and let all their followers know. It is actually a really nice thing that has taken many forms such as FollowFriday on Twitter, +K on Klout and many other examples.
Enter Dapsem, an iPhone app developed and created by a friend, Hamutal, who you can follow here. The concept could not be simpler, and by now, most people realize that if there is one principle that wins in the world of mobile apps, it is simplicity. A “daps” is the official term for a fist bump (who knew?) and with Daps’em, you can give three daps a day to anyone you choose, for whatever reason you want.
Except it does not end there, far from it. The app integrates with Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare and allows you to easily tag the person in the shoutout so everyone knows you dapped them.
The UI and colors of Daps’em are both note worthy, although I would have liked it to be a little less busy. Along the bottom of Daps’em, you have five tabs: Feed, Hall of Dap, New Dap, Notifications, and Profile. On that front, the UI reminds me of the iOS Foursquare app.
To be honest, I am using the app now on iOS5 and I have noticed some bugs and slowness, but having tested Daps’em on previous versions of iOS, I am fairly convinced the issues I am experiencing are due to incompatibility with iOS5, which is in beta and not available to the public.
In addition to dapping someone you can also comment on a dap and “yay” it, which is the equivalent of Liking or +1 ing something. Pretty straight forward. You can also attach a photo to a dap, just like you could on Foursquare.
All in all, the app is super simple in both concept and implementation. The main challenge Daps’em faces is of course adoption. For it to be a success, there needs to be more engagement in the app, and we all know what that means. It needs users and a lot of them.
I enjoy the app a lot, and am going to continue to use it, but I do think the team should work on differentiating Daps’em from other services if they want to take users’ attention away from Facebook, Klout, Twitter, or other services.
You can download Daps’em for free here. Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments.
