Uplike 2.2.1

It’s amazing how new social networks emerge all the time, despite being a cluttered environment as it is. What’s worse, the networks themselves are cluttered and confusing, failing to create any real incentive to pick them up and start using them.

With Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all coupled up, there’s little room for emerging networks to make their presence felt, but companies such as Uplike insist on making a name for themselves.

A confusing social network

It’s not clear just how popular Uplike really is, but considering the relatively few comments available for each post, it’s clear that it’s not on everyone’s menu (unlike Facebook and Instagram).

The content is abundant, but it’s poorly organized and categorized, despite the use of hashtags throughout the thing.

The app is compatible with iOS 8, which means the entire tool works even better now with the latest operating system version.The app’s design is plenty intuitive and the entire experience is smoother and more fun with this tool following a recent update. There’s also a new “follow” icon that allows you to follow the people that you enjoy getting updates from, much like you would on any other social network oriented tool. Any uplikes they make will instantly get delivered into your suggestions feed.

The Notifications include an activity feed that allows users to see what the people they’re following are doing on the app, as well as when someone comments, reuplikes or favorites your own posts.

In a nutshell, it’s a lot like Pinterest and StumbleUpon. You just hunt stuff on the web that you find interesting and “uplike” it to your profile, with the option to make it visible to your friends on Facebook or inside the Uplike community. You can also use it privately, but you still need to log into it and create a user name before you can do anything.

Too much pop

The GUI is just as thick and bewildering as the service itself. There's too much color (particularly a lot of that mauve theme), there’s no order in how the content is arranged, the process of posting is glitchy and sometimes requires you to retype your hashtags, and the image quality is quite poor in many cases. Overall, it’s not something you’d want to use on a daily basis. At least not if you’re used to more streamlined services.

No limit to your uplikes

One thing some users may find appealing is the fact that uplikes can be assigned to just about anything you find on the web, from photos memes and videos, to links, music and places you’ve visited. The only drawback is that, for all of this to make sense, others need to be just as engaged with Uplike as you are. And, as I mentioned earlier, it’s not exactly the most widely used social network out there.

Also worth noting is that you want to be careful how you set it up if you log in with Facebook, in order to protect your privacy. The minimum age requirement is 17+, which goes to say some other things about what content you might happen upon.