The best thing about always having my iPhone is that I can constantly record all the cool stuff happening around me. I do an amazing thing, I take a picture of the amazing thing. The only problem is that once I’ve shared the photo to Facebook or Instagram or wherever, it’s just gone. I’m not going to come back in three months and relive the amazing things I did on a particular day through social media posts. It would be awkward to accomplish, and, let’s face it, the results wouldn’t be that attractive.
Enter Days, a great app for recording all of the swell stuff you do in a twenty-four hour period. It looks good and was made for keeping a day’s worth of activity in a single neat update. We’ll take a look and see how it fares against all the ways you already have to share all of your stuff.
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How Was Your Day?
To get started, you’ll need to create a new account in Days. Choose a username and password, and upload an avatar to represent yourself. Days lets you add your phone number to your account when you’re setting things up, and that seemed a bit grabby to me, but you do what feels right. Once you’re in, you can add a little blurb about yourself or set your account to private, so that only you can see your Days updates.
Get your account set up how you like.
Now that you’re in, you can start to get your feet. Take a look at the Everybody tab. You’ll find all of the Days posts for all of the friends you added during account creation here, or if you’re a hermit like me and don’t have any friends with the Days app, you’ll just have Jeremy, CEO at Days. What Tom was to Myspace, Jeremy is to Days. I found it helpful to browse through Jeremy’s day to get a feel for what I should be doing with Days.
Each day is a single update that gets posted after twenty-four hours. You can’t post your day any sooner than that, so you’ll have to wait to let everyone know about that awesome vegan brunch you just had until tomorrow. What you do is collect images and captions throughout your day, sort of a curated look at the day in the life of you. Each day can then be saved and shared as a single post, instead of being released in dribs and drabs through various social media.
You can take pictures and add captions to let followers know what’s going on.
Once your day has been posted, followers on Days can comment on the things you’ve been doing. Each update within your day will have its own set of comments, but you can also view all of your comments as one long thread. Days includes nine fun little emoticons too, that will appear next to a commenter’s image, and while that’s not a lot to work with, it does allow you to add personality to your comments.
Take the Day
Days is trying to be two very different things. That’s okay. It’s a social network first and foremost, and it allows you to share the stuff you’re doing with friends and interact with their posts. The problem with that is I already have a bunch of social networks to check and keep up with. I’m sort of okay adding Days to the list, but it’s not going to supplant the big guys, and it’s already twenty-four hours behind. It’s going to be hard to convince my friends to join in when they can post pictures of the funny-shaped potato they saw at the farmer’s market to Instagram right now, no need to wait until tomorrow morning.
You can personalize your post a bit, and friends can comment on public posts.
The other thing Days can be is a personal journal. I think this probably works better with a private account, but that’s really up to you, and you may look forward to comments on your entries. Either way, if you’re using Days as a way to record your day for yourself rather than as a way to connect with others, it’s going to be great for that.
I did finally manage to share my day, but I never got my social networks connected.
I tried to combine the two, record what I did for myself and connect to Facebook to share my day. It would be a post to say, “Hey! Look what I did!” Unfortunately, that doesn’t work too well. There are prompts during account creation to connect to Facebook and Twitter to find friends, and I was hoping someone would pop up, but I couldn’t ever get Days to work like that. I just got error after error. Later, when I wanted to share my Days post by connecting to Facebook from within the app, I again got errors. It was possible to share an already published post separately, but the errors are disheartening.
Final Thoughts
Days looks great. It has a flat, modern UI, and the colors are perfect without getting in the way of your own photos. You get to choose your favorite color for each post, which is great to set the mood for what you accomplished (or didn’t) in a day. I’ll admit I didn’t really have a sense of what I was supposed to do when I first opened the app, and it took me more than a couple of minutes to figure everything out, but once I found my feet, Days was a breeze to use.
Like any small social network, you’ll have to get used to the quiet. If you already have a lot of friends using Days or are okay with little interaction, you’re all set to try out this neat little app. For the rest of us who do want to talk about that photo of the duck that attacked us walking into our building, I sure wish the sharing functions worked better. That’s a real dealbreaker for me. Eventually I get my posts shared, but for an otherwise great app, I feel like everything should just work.
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