Posse
Posse
Free on Apple iOS
Posse is a nicely designed app, but it just feels like a poor man’s Foursquare.
The idea is to find cafes, bars and places of interest (not Narnia) around you based on your friend’s recommendations. You can sign up with email or Facebook to maximise your searching potential, and use location services, or enter a location manually, to find what you want; there are categories to search from like ‘Brunch’, ‘Fashion’, ‘Popular’ and ‘Awesomeness’, pictures and maps of the listed places and comments from other users.
If your friends like the place/thing/creature, it’ll show up at the bottom of the entry under ‘Loved by your posse’s network’. If someone you don’t know has left a comment, it’ll show you who and say they’re outside your network. You can select places as favourites to appear on your ‘street’, a splash page on your profile section with your favourite places displayed, with room for eight (plus another street). You can add a place, make comments (although only by adding the place to your street – this is, after all, a recommendation service, not a review/warning system), follow others and have them follow you.
You can search for friends to follow, but this is through ye olde name search, not via Facebook or any such option, which seems like a lost opportunity.
Basically, it’s Foursquare but with less content. The main problem is there’s just not that much showing up. The nearest cafe recommended was 80 metres away – Foursquare’s was 20 metres. Searching for things like groceries, supermarkets, even Sainsbury’s delivered nada, and searching for WiFi (really handy addition, by the way) didn’t bring up the Starbucks about 20 metres away.
I suspect down the line, Posse would become more useful in terms of registered places and it has some interesting ideas, like saving your favourite place, using friend’s recommendations and searching specifically for WiFi spots, but at the moment, there just doesn’t seem to be that much out there.
