Banjo wants to take you to the Olympics via social media
Last week, I talked about a few of the apps available to track the progress of your favorite country at the London Olympics. Today, I want to talk about an app that wants to take you to London by way of your favorite social media tools.
The app is called Banjo, and the idea behind the app is to connect you with your friends, no matter what social network they are on. The story goes that the founder of the app was waiting for a flight at an airport and tweeted where he was. He had a buddy also at the airport waiting for a flight one gate over, who checked in at his location. If they were both on the same social network they could have gotten together while waiting for their flights, but since they weren’t they missed the connection. That’s when the idea of an app that spans the social networks to connect friends was born.
After you download the app you will need to sign in. You can use your account from any of the following networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn, or Google. Since the app works by finding your friends, the more social networks you are a part of and sign into, the better your experience with the app will be. However if you are only looking for some more cool Olympics coverage, you really only need to sign in with one account.
The reason I am even talking about the app, though, is its coverage of the Olympics. Banjo brings you to the Olympics in a way that even most news stories can’t. Because it is pulling posts, tweets, pictures, and video right from people’s social network feed, you are getting a great look into what the Olympics look like from the attendees’ point of view, not someone with a press pass. All it takes is someone geo-tagging a post that they are at the Olympics, and it will show up in your feed. Since the social networks are available around the world, that means that what you see in your feed will also be from around the world. You could see a picture of a guy with a flag of Turkey cheering on his team in one post, and the next one will be someone from Brazil cheering on their team.
This is a pretty cool app for connecting your friends across different networks, and it seems to work pretty well in that regard. The reason I downloaded it in the first place however was for the Olympics coverage. But while the coverage is pretty cool when you find it, I had difficulty finding it to begin with. After you sign in, you will need to click the menu button (three horizontal lines) in the upper left corner, then tap Interests. You will need to enter a search term in the box in order to move on. I did a search for basketball and it then took me to a places screen. In order to see the Olympics posts you will then have to click the locations button in the top right corner and select Olympics, under Trending. Then you need to select your venue, since it organizes the posts by location. If you are looking for posts about basketball, you will probably want to select the Basketball venue to get the best results. Once I figured out how to find the Olympics feeds, it was pretty cool to see what people had to say that got to experience everything live.
If you want to get a little more up close and personal with the Olympics, give Banjo a try, and when the Olympics are over maybe you can use it to find your friend that is eating across the same restaurant when neither of you knew the other was there.
Download: iTunes
Download: Play Store
[www.ban.jo]
