When Twitter launched in 2006 no one was quite sure what it was for. They weren’t sure who would use it or why anyone would want to make their SMS messages public. But there was no question about what the service did. It was simple, and that was one of its attractions.
The same can’t be said of Hashable, a unique social media app available on both iOS and Android. The service might best be described as a kind of social answer to Foursquare. Instead of announcing to the world where you are, the app tells everyone who you’re with and what you’re doing with them — although that’s not quite how it describes itself. Rather, the app declares that it’s “the best way to save and remember your connections with anyone.”
You can enter contacts by syncing with Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! or Hotmail (although apparently not Facebook), then add new contacts using their email addresses or Twitter usernames. Profiles look professional with room for a photo, job title, company name and industry field, as well as a short bio and links both to a personal blog and LinkedIn page.
All of that is useful and clear enough, which is why contact books have been around as long as email and why contact apps are standard with every smartphone. Where Hashable tries to stand out is in its ability to keep track of the relationship with those contacts. Meet someone for a working lunch, for example, and you can add a hashtag (such as #lunch) next to the name, indicating both to yourself and to all your other contacts who you’re meeting and what you’re doing with them.
The app can sync with your phone’s contact book and calendar to integrate meeting and date reminders. Over time, you should build up a record of all your activity with the people you’ve met.
It would be easy to dismiss the usefulness of a service like this. We don’t usually need to keep a record of when we last had lunch with a friend or a business contact, but the service comes with good pedigree. Its founder and CEO is Michael Yavonditte, the former CEO of Quigo (which was sold to AOL in 2007 for $340 million) and an investor in Meetup, Tracked and Klout among others. Spot that a friend of yours is having lunch with Michael Yavonditte, and you might just recall that you haven’t met for a while — and discover Hashable’s value.
Download Hashable at the Android Market:
https://market.android.com/details?id=hashable.android&hl=en
