What is this strange animal called NuffNangX? Their tagline is “Social Blog Stalking”. Basically it is a mobile app and website that lets you follow and read blogs on the go via their app.
Signing up on their website.
After signing up and logging in, you are brought to this page and the little message that is like a guide. Let’s see where this takes us.
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Helpful arrows to help you navigate the site.
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You had to add a blog to get in so I added my food blog as shown in the sidebar.
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A little bit of social interaction begins where you can “heart” your favourite blog and it will let the blogger know that you have done this. Not sure I like this as I can’t stalk blogs anonymously.
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You can find more blogs to add via the search bar.
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Nice feature, you can comment on the blog directly via the interface.
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So conversations are one the main interactions as it has a prominent place in the navigation bar on top. We shall see how this functions in practice later.
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Where you can update your settings.
Down to the nitty gritty – Claim Your Blog
You will need to then verify ownership
They have a feature where you can replace regular blog comments with NuffNagX Conversations. Since I don’t know anyone on the platform, this might not be useful for now. Maybe later when it gets a bit busier. So for now, I will just verify my blog and ignore the conversations.
At this point, I have a slight problem as it requires pasting code into my header file in my WordPress theme. I use a non standard theme which doesn’t allow editing of the main files. Will have to wing it and see what works.
Well, that didn’t work. Will have to wait for support to get back to me.
Editing Your Profile
Meanwhile, I updated this.
Browsing around NuffNangX
Since I have only followed my own blog, this is what shows up on my “timeline”. Nice clean layout, an image and an excerpt.
Finding blogs to follow
Since this is a Singaporean venture where they have a massive list of users, most of the blogs on the system are Singaporean. This page has a twitter like feel with big follow buttons. Have not checked out the usability on the phone yet.
The Social Buttons
When you hit share, it opens up the twitter and Facebook buttons. You can also start a conversation with another NuffNangX member.
Conversations on NuffNangX
Conversations are limited to 500 characters and it seems to be only within the platform. I thought it had the ability to make comments on the blog itself. This is a major issue for me. There is no incentive for me to make comments on this platform except to create more engagement on yet another social platform. I would prefer to comment on the blog itself to get a link back to my blog. I believe they are working on adding this functionality. Watch this space.
In Summary, I think NuffNangX can be a great tool to help us consume content via the mobile. I think they will totally dominate if they added some functionality where their platform is integrated with other bigger social platforms out there.
You can try it out on their site http://www.nuffnangx.com/
