Recording audio notes while on the go; spreading news and information quickly — if you ever had a need/desire to do either of those things, I may have found a great iPhone app that will suit your needs. Cinch is an application that gives you the ability to easily share audio, text and photo updates using your mobile device or from your computer.
Cinch, developed by the folks over at BlogTalkRadio, is a free app that enables you to capture and report your experiences using a simple and intuitive interface. This app allows you to easily broadcast your message through Facebook, Twitter, and the CinchCast.com community.
Now, note that I loosely said “Mobile device” above, and not specifically “iPhone.” While there is a incredibly slick app in the iPhone app store, cinch also allows the ability to add your phone number to the registry, then call a “land-line” number to record your audio that you want published as a cinchcast. This may be subtle, but in my mind it’s absolutely brilliant since it absolutely opens up the potential user base for this tool.
I’ve been using the app for about 2 weeks now, and I have really put it through it’s paces by recording audio notes, audio podcasts and posting them immediately online. Immediately after hitting the publish button you have the option of selecting which social media profiles that you’d like to send an update status too as well (Facebook, Twitter, and the online CinchCast community).
Probably my biggest concern with this app and the user experience is the way that the online CinchCast directory is laid out – it’s not very intuitive and only displays in a linear fashion. This makes it very difficult to find cinchcasts from people unless you know exactly what their name or user-id is. What needs to happen to improve the user experience is an implementation of categorizing the list in a more user-friendly approach allowing the ability to search by category, interest, topic, etc. Hopefully, that will be coming prior to the “beta” tag being removed from the app.
For website owners, there are some valuable tools offered by cinch that allow you to place widgets, badges and embedded cinch content on your website. I found that to be very useful.
Overall, I like this app, and I will continue to use it for quick recordings of topics, discussions and even quick audio interviews. I appreciate the automation of being able to upload a recording, and have it immediately hit my social networking profiles. The price is obviously right (since it’s free), and I would imagine that the developers at BlogTalkRadio will maintain that pricing as their main focus is on the advanced podcasting tools and software they’ve developed. Click here to download.
Photo Credit: skyfaller
