Social networking on iPhone and iPad: the definitive guide

The Viddy app resembles a mash-up of multiple social apps: there are Instagram-style special effects, YouTube-style tagging, likes and commenting, and integrated uploading. The app enables you to shoot, edit and share short clips in several useful ways.

If you like food, you'll love Forkly

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Forkly

Forkly is a wonderful app for foodies, but it's only as good as the people using it - so at the moment it's absolutely fantastic if you're in America, but a bit less useful in the UK. Let's change that by getting everybody we know to sign up and use it, because it's a great idea that we really want to succeed.

The idea behind Forkly is very simple: when you're out for a meal, you can snap and share photos of what you're having and tell the world what you thought of it. There are even Instagram-style filters to show your pudding in the best possible light.

Forkly is a kind of Hitchhiker's Guide to Dinner, enabling you to discover where to go, what to have and what isn't worth paying over the odds for, and you can follow individual users' updates if you discover they have similar tastes to you.

If you like reading, you'll love Opuss

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Opuss

"Twitter isn't about words," Opuss's developers say. "It's a communication utility." And you should see what they say about Facebook.

Opuss, though, is all about words: big words and little ones, big ideas and little observations. You might have an angry rant or a little poem, a shaggy dog story or a silly joke: they're all grist to Opuss's mill.

Opuss is a social network for sharing words. Rather than publish to a blog, Tumblr or similar service where it might only be seen by a handful of people, when you share something using the Opuss app you're sharing it with other Opuss users - and they can give you feedback or just make you happy by following your updates.

It's a fast and fun way to find interesting snippets, and the search feature is particularly good, enabling you to search by kind and category, such as stories about animals.

If you like weather, you'll love Weathermob

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Weathermob

Here in Tap!'s native UK, we get more weather in a day than many Californians see in a lifetime - and that means Weathermob could well be the perfect app for these rain-lashed isles. It's like Facebook or Twitter where the only topic of conversation is the weather: what the weather forecast says, what's happening right now, and whether you were caught in it when you were going to the shops.

The app connects to Facebook and Twitter so you can post to your feed. It's not the sort of app you'll spend all day using, but as a fun, human-powered alternative to the default app.

If you like photography, you'll love Instagram

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch

Instagram

Instagram has more than 50 million users, guaranteeing your photos a much wider audience than any of its imitators.

Although Instagram has all the basic social network features you don't have to use it if you don't want to: it's quite possible to use its integration with Flickr, Facebook and Twitter to post to those services instead.

Many people do just that, because the app itself comes with a range of retro-themed filters that produce really great results. In the right hands - yours - Instagram can make good photos even better, accurately mimicking old cameras.

If you like TV, you'll love zeebox

Price: Free
Works with: iPhone, iPod touch, iPad

Zeebox

According to Stephen Fry, "zeebox may change everything about the way we watch TV forever." That's a pretty bold claim, but then zeebox is a pretty clever app.

Carrie Marshall
Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall (Twitter) has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band HAVR.