Facebook means many things to people—a platform to grow your brand, a place to do business, or a tool to spread advocacy campaigns. To me, it’s where I house portions of my personal life, and so I share hilarious videos of my tot singing Grace Potter’s “Something That I Want” or photos of my kids’ milestones to family and friends.
But because I use Facebook for completely non-professional networking, I don’t always log in and “connect” with these people. If I have a photo or a video worth sharing, I just pull up Facebook, upload it to an album, tag people, and make my exit as soon as it’s done. Call me antisocial, but the busy newsfeed, crowded profile page, overly stacked up sidebar, and noisy (sometimes dumbing) content being shared left and right makes me want to run for the hills.
That is, until I gave Moment a try. It’s a menu bar app that aims to “reinvent the way you post to Facebook” through easy drag and drop. I’ve used it for a while now and I’m impressed with the app so far. It certainly went over and above my expectations of a Facebook-related application with features that I’m very excited to share with you in this review.
A Better Way to Share Moments on Facebook
As shown in the video, the key feature of Moment is being able to drag and drop almost all types of content to post on Facebook. While there are apps like Courier with the same functionality, it sets itself apart by allowing users to post status updates, add captions to photos and videos, and post links of websites and pages.
I’ve tried dragging and dropping photos, videos, links, and highlighted text to Moment, and so far had no problems with how they are displayed on my timeline. My favorite feature is how the app allows me to drag single or a batch of photos to either its menu bar icon or photo tray, and prepares them by giving me options to create a new photo album or select an existing one. I can then slap on a message to go with the photos, add my location, tag people, or change my photos’ privacy settings.
Uploading photos of the little guy via Moment.
Once its done, I just hit the blue Post button to upload. I’d get an audible notification and a link to the uploaded content—otherwise called “moment”—pasted to my clipboard afterwards.
Easy, right? But Moment offers more than just convenience and simplicity. The intuitive design and user experience looks and feels great that I find myself wanting to post more stuff to Facebook with it. It isn’t cluttered with features, messy, or confusing to use. And with just a click of the small “F” button at the bottom right portion of the app, it takes you immediately to your Facebook account via the browser.
Focused Timeline, Preferences, and Other Points of Interest
At this point, I’d like to clarify that Moment is not a Facebook desktop application to browse your newsfeed, comment, or chat with your connections. You have apps like Menutab Pro for Facebook and Social Tab for that.
A focused timeline showing your Facebook notifications.
What Moment does have is a “focused” timeline where you can see all of your notifications, with the ability to click to view the activity in full on the browser. So instead of seeing posts of all kinds dripping from the app, you only see activity that involves and matters to you. This of course would depend on your Notifications settings, which you can edit when logged in to Facebook.
This may or may not work for you depending on how active you are on the network. If your daily activities include posting, commenting, chatting, and sharing to Facebook, you may feel limited by this minimalistic timeline.
Check out the Preferences panel for more options.
You can change Moment’s default settings by clicking on the gear button to open the Preferences panel. You can set a global shortcut to bring Moment in front of your active windows, have it start at login, and disable/enable sound effects.
At the bottom, you can choose to have Moment auto-enhance your posted photos—reducing its size for faster uploads; you can deselect this if you want to retain the original file size—or deselect the Copy posted link to clipboard feature. Finally, if you want to know more about Tapmates, the company behind Moment’s development, you can do so by checking the About tab.
Beautified Facebook Sharing
Share photos, videos, and even text to Facebook.
Moment is an app with a clear and precise focus in mind, built with just the necessary features needed to make sharing content to Facebook easy and seamless. However, in my opinion, the idea that it “reinvents” Facebook sharing isn’t completely there yet, since the ability to drag and drop content has been around and adopted by other apps already.
Furthermore, Moment is currently priced at $3.99 at the Mac App Store. Some may balk at this, considering that you can just log in to Facebook and do all that Moment can do for free. But, if you want a clean, beautiful, and simplified way of sharing your thoughts, moments, and the occasional content nuggets you’d pick up on the web, this a great quality app for the job.
Overall, Moment gets a thumbs-up and a rating of 9/10 for excellent performance, a great feature set, and being able to deliver as promised. There were no bugs or crashes when uploading, posting is a quick and easy process, and the added flexibility of adjusting privacy settings, tagging, and adding one’s location gives me more control over what and how I want to post my content. Finally, I love how its design enhances the user experience further, and so sharing to Facebook isn’t just a chore or a task you gotta do before heading off to bed.
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