IntoNow review

We review IntoNow, a social networking app for iPhone that listens to what you’re watching on TV, and tells the world

There’s a need in modern society to document every tiny aspect of our lives. We post on Facebook when we’re about to take the dog for a walk, we Tweet about the stick it picked up while out walking, we log our (not so) sneaky visit to the pub while on the walk in Foursquare, and then we update Facebook when we get home.

Honestly, it’s not remotely interesting stuff. At least, not yet. But imagine what it’ll be like for digital archaeologists 200 years from now. They’ll be able to piece together the daily life of every single one of us with a level of detail that’d be scary, if we were around to see it. And the new IntoNow app will pour even more information into the social navigation middens of our daily existences.

In many respects IntoNow concentrates on a very small aspect of our social world: our TV viewing habits. But it does so in such as way as to expand on the fascinating manner of broadcast content.

Tapping the green TV button at the bottom of the app launches the audio recognition feature, which listens to the TV program you’re watching and identifies not only the show, but the episode as well. It achieves this by sending the audio clip online, where it’s analysed and the particular program detected.

It sounds like a convoluted method of telling folk what you’re looking at on the idiot’s lantern, and it is, but there’s no avoiding how impressive it is when the info comes back complete with pictures and IMDB, iTunes and Neflix data.

Your current viewing schedule is then shared with friends within the IntoNow system, and can be added to Twitter and Facebook with almost no effort. You can even set up notifications to tell you when friends are watching the same thing, giving you the opportunity for something of a virtual TV and pizza party.

Unfortunately, the app still needs some work. The system is smooth and impressively accurate when it works, but it’s regrettably prone to crashing. Undoubtedly this will be fixed as the system settles in, but right now it’s a little too easy to sack off the idea of sharing your habits as soon as the app bombs out on you.

Perhaps its most useful feature is in discovering new shows to watch based on what other people are clearly enjoying, providing unsolicited recommendations from people who, presumably, have an opinion you care about. Also, it’s just really entertaining doing the audio recognition thing, so give it a whirl for that alone.

[Update: During editing we were unable to find IntoNow on the UK App Store, but it can be downloaded on the US one]

]]>