Welcome to the modern age of social networking and electronic communication, everyone and there dog has a facebook or twitter account and everyone is telling everyone what everyone is doing pretty much all the time.
In amongst my my instruments folder on my Iphone you can see two apps by Smule ‘Ocarina’ and ‘Madpad’. they are two great examples of social sharing applications. When searching Smule on google you will see that they are all about social music and audio applications, making playing music fun on your mobile device and enabling you to share you activity with friends.
The first App ‘Ocarina’ lets you play an ocarina by blowing in to the microphone of your device and holding buttons in the same way you would play the actual instrument. The app goes the extra mile by allowing you to share what you are playing LIVE over the internet, you can also then go and look at a world view of all the people playing and even select a region to tune in on. This sort of sharing is amazing, giving users a feeling of real time sharing and listening to music that is being created on mobile devices is excellent.
The second app ‘MadPad’ allows you to build your own video/soundboard of noises and sounds to play back to yourself and record. you create 12 sound bites and then play around with them yo your hearts content AGAIN Smule make this app even more awesome by allowing you to share you creations online and instantly at that! they have even integrates twitter and facebook sharing. You can browse all the public sound boards and play them on your device.
This kind of sharing for this sort of application is amazing, I think without this social sharing integration these applications may have faded in with the rest. Adding that extra functionality gives the apps an edge.
This is definitely something I want to integrate in to my Application, If I can let users generate dynamic content, functions and proceses that work really well and then share these online with the world and with friends then that would be amazing.
I think having presets and examples of how users can share their content is a good Idea, giving some inspiration but not anything majorly complex gives users the freedom to think outside the box and go one better than the app developer.