[I Know What You Did Last Tuesday] Blinq Overlays Your Contacts’ Social Updates On Top Of Your Messaging Conversations

Oh my. This is creepy. And cool. Very cool. It has stalker-like potential and unequivocal convenience. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Imagine you get a message from a contact, through SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, or other apps. You start talking to said contact and they go on blabbering about some very important event that happened in their life. You haven’t the faintest idea what that is because, let’s face it, you do not have the luxury of spending your entire day checking Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Plus, between all these networks, you follow a thousand people at least, so do they all expect you to keep up with their dog’s latest trim and their baby’s first burp? Ugh, they do…

In an ideal world, you would have the time to go check your contact’s various social presences across all these apps, then come back to have an informed conversation with them. Because you care, don’t you? But ideal world not permitting (and not existing), you don’t do that, and you manage to tread lightly and blindly through the minefield of that conversation. Whew. Crisis averted. What? Another person wants to talk now? Why can’t we go back to sending letters that took weeks to reach their destination?

Now let’s widen that imagination field and consider the possibility that the moment you opened that second chat, a small white bubble popped on top of the screen, and it’s only visible in that particular conversation. You tap it and it does the heavy lifting of crawling through Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, finding the latest updates from the person you’re talking to, and overlaying them there for you to quickly browse through. “Jane, your new purse? Totes dope!” “Sir, your kids are growing up so quickly. You must be proud.” “Hahaha mom, that cat gif was the funniest!”

That’s what Blinq does. It’s a bit like social cheating, but the cool kind, unless you decide to use your powers for evil. It’s awesome, practical, fast, and well-suited for our hectic over-connected over-sharing over-socialized modern society. It’s the glue that could help you stay tethered to all of your relationships.

We’ve seen this same concept before, either built on top of your browser email client (like Rapportive) or your phone dialer (like Contacts+ and CallApp), but Blinq takes it a step further, implementing it where it makes even more sense: on your phone, on top of your chats, where you probably do more than 80% of your everyday communications already. None of the aforementioned apps ever appealed to me, but I had to install Blinq as soon as I heard about it. It didn’t disappoint.

But because of its mere premise, Blinq requires a few permissions. You have to start off by signing into Facebook, there’s no getting around that. Once it’s done, you can also connect Twitter and Instagram. Blinq also requires access to your phone’s contacts and to your notification panel. That’s where it gets triggered, by keeping an eye on who is messaging you. The app doesn’t have a lot of settings, only letting you switch between day and night themes, and pick which Messaging apps it should work on. These are: Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Hangouts, Email (that too!), Skype, and SMS.

Blinq is free on the Play Store and you can start bewildering people with your continued interest in their average lives by installing it through the widget below.

Source: TechCrunch