FellowUp: A Social Networking Personal Organizer

FellowUp is a social networking personal organizer application. It has a desktop version as well as an iOS application with Android and Blackberry applications to come soon. The app syncs with your LinkedIn, Facebook and Gmail accounts to get your contacts, as well as you can manually import contacts from Outlook. What you then do is write notes and reminders about these contacts, or even just for yourself. Reminders can include things like lunch with a friend, a colleague's birthday or a reminder to remind a relative about something.

The FellowUp homescreen

Design

The app's design is highly simplistic and goes along with the simplistic features it offers. There is basically a bottom bar with four tabs. One takes you to a screen where you can add new notes, reminders and contacts, another takes you to notes, the third to your reminders and the last one to your contact list. The difference between adding a note and adding a reminder is that a reminder has the time element to it whereas a note is just something you need to mention or remember about someone. As said earlier, because the application isn't too feature heavy, the design is actually clean and simple enough to use the app with.

Your notes list

Features

The features of the app are pretty simple. When you add a note, the app saves a note, when you add a reminder, the app saves a reminder and your contacts list is mostly your Facebook friends (or whichever accounts you have synced with the app). If your contacts haven't linked say their Facebook and Google accounts or their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts, the same person will show up as two different people in your contacts list. However, when you write notes or reminders about them, they do not get a notification about it so it really doesn't matter which account you choose to write a note about. You can bundle your contacts into groups of either friends, family or school, or make your own groups. The add contact tab is for if you meet a contact who's not on a social network and you still want to remember them. It's like adding them as a contact in your phone anyway.

Adding a contact who's not on a social network

One thing I noticed is that while reminders have a date and time setting, you don't get an alarm when you need the reminder. The phone doesn't buzz or ring or do anything as a normal alarm reminder would do. This means, you have to keep checking the app for reminders of things you need to do. The other thing I noticed is that when you write a note or a reminder on the website, the app doesn't automatically update itself, you have to sign out and sign back in to access these notes or reminders. The other thing I noticed is that the app is supposed to accumulate information from your contacts' various social networks and present it to you on their page within the app, however, for most of my contacts, the app made me go to their individual Facebook pages which eventually it couldn't access anyway.

Alarmless reminders

The website is a little more complex in its features, for instance it has a "My Day" section where you can see all the reminders and notes you've either written for the day you're on or for reminders of things you need to do that day. The website also lets you add your Facebook, Google and LinkedIn accounts which the app doesn't let you do. Additionally, on the website, if a contact has two different unlinked accounts, for instance, a Facebook and a Google account and shows up as two different contacts, you can merge them into one contact. You can also create groups of contacts, by either clubbing selected contacts into the preset "friends", "school", or "family" groups or make your own groups. These groups do not translate over to the mobile app, as the mobile app only lists individual contacts, not groups.

Contact 'pages'

Conclusion

As is obvious from the description of features, the FellowUp app really only seems to be a very very light version of its website. It doesn't serve as a self contained application where you basically have most of the website's functionality on the go. It is a free app but really can mostly only be used for referencing and writing notes on the go. A far superior alternative to this app, would of course be Evernote where you can do so much more than just write text notes and give yourself alarm-less reminders of your friends and contacts. Furthermore, contacts can only be brought in from four sources. FellowUp says that they're working on syncing with Twitter, Yahoo and other internet services. The FellowUp app is available from the App Store and can only be used once you have signed up for an account and asked for an invite to use the app.