If you’re into social networking, you will know the importance of sharing content with others. Sharing content helps you gain a loyal following and engage people in conversations. Even during the course of a pretty uneventful day, there might be quiet a few things in our mind to share with our friends and followers. Often these thoughts are fleeting, and some things might go unshared.
What we need is an app that can help us consolidate the items we want to share with our social network. Social Clipboard is a Mac desktop application that allows you to copy any text, picture or screenshot and share it via social networks (or upload it to Dropbox for later access).
Let’s see how it stacks up!
Setting Up
First Launch Screen
Social Clipboard automatically detects whether this is your first launch and offers to set up your social network accounts.
List of Social Networks
From the lower left corner of the window, choose the social network of your choice. Currently Facebook, Twitter and Dropbox are supported. Sadly though, you cannot add multiple accounts to track in the app at the moment. For those who plan to skip this step to checkout the Social Clipboard user interface before jumping in, you can always come back and add the accounts from the Preferences screen.
Adding a Social Network Account
There is no OAuth or FBConnect and you will have enter your login credentials manually into the app. That’s when I hit the first road block. I use LastPass to generate and store strong passwords and I don’t remember any of my passwords. So I copied the password and tried pasting it in the login screen.
But unfortunately, Social Clipboard copied the password to the app and cleared the clipboard – therefore I wasn’t able to paste the same into the password field. So, I had to manually type in all the characters of the password one after another (it’s a pretty lengthy strong password). It was such an annoying experience.
Ease of Use
Still not clear what Social Clipboard can do? It acts as a clipboard that holds everything that you copy on the desktop. If you have used Pastebot on iOS you will find that the app pretty much does the same, but adds the ability to post them to your social stream.
Social Clipboard has a very straight forward design and workflow. Be it an image, text file etc., it’s just a case of copying something for it to automatically show up in the Social Clipboard repository. It’s just not the files from the desktop (like the password info from LastPass Vault) – you can even copy from the Internet. For example I copied an image from a Mac.AppStorm article and it showed up right away in the app. Impressive!
Notifications Screen
Social Clipboard has got a bunch of Notification options as well, to alert you of the status of the upload, save and shortening of a URL. You can also set animated and audio alerts to notify when the content from the clipboard is copied to the app.
Sharing Content
Uploading an Image
After saving the content to the clipboard, select the appropriate social network icon to share it with your friends and peers. I chose to tweet the image I copied. Twitpic is the default image uploading service, and you start by giving the image a title. As soon as you hit OK, the image will be uploaded and you will be given a Twitpic link to the same.
Sending a Tweet
From here, it is more or less the same way you compose a tweet. Add a few words of comment, add a link and share the tweet with the world. If the URL you are sharing is quite lengthy, use the Shorten URL option to prune it. Bit.ly is the default URL shortening service.
Once the tweet is successfully sent, you will get a notification. However, if you want to double check whether the tweet has made it or not, you will have to access your social network account from a client of your choice.
Saving to Dropbox
The usefulness of Social Clipboard is two fold. First it acts as a clipboard for your social networks and second, it acts a desktop intermediary for moving content to your Dropbox.
Uploading to Dropbox
Just like the way you share the content on a social network, hit the Dropbox icon to initiate the transfer. All images are uploaded to the public folder of your account, so if you are sharing sensitive content, exercise caution. A short URL linking directly to the image can be obtained as well.
Final Thoughts
I thought I would be able to keep up with my Twitter stream from the app, but I couldn’t. That would have been a solid addition, as would the ability to copy content from the social stream directly to your Dropbox account.
Social Clipboard was my first paid Mac App Store purchase, and hence I made sure it is a decent app to start with. Social network dwellers will definitely find the app very handy.
The idea and execution of helping users copy and share things from their social stream is quite good. But it is the Dropbox integration that makes the app particularly unique.