Is Yahoo OneConnect the Flock for iPhone?

Flock is a web browser that is popular among the social media crowd because it helps aggregate your status updates from various social networks right on your browser. While the iPhone has a great native Facebook application and there are dozens of mobile twitter clients, how does Yahoo’s OneConnect preview stack up for compiling all your streams into one iPhone application?

Keeping in mind that it’s supposed to be a preview, I hesitantly installed the OneConnect application from the iTunes App Store. It installed fine and started up without any error messages. It seems that the Flock-like feature that aggregates your social streams works just fine, but there were a few glitches with setup and the contacts feature is largely unfinished.

I logged into the application using my username and password. The application asked for it in full email form, but I got an error message until I left out the “@yahoo.com.” Then the application paused while it loaded my contacts from Yahoo Mail and Flickr.

Next I went about setting up some of my other base social network sites to see how they fit into the OneConnect puzzle. After entering my Facebook credentials, I waited a relatively exorbitant amount of time only to get an error message that OneConnect couldn’t add my contacts. I clicked on the ‘Pulse’ tab to find that the stream worked, but the contacts function wouldn’t load.

Entering my Twitter credentials resulted in largely the same results. I decided that this was enough of a test due to the wait times and persistent error messages related to the contacts. The tool also supports Bebo, MySpace, Dopplr, Friendster, Last.fm and YouTube in addition to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter.

Once the stream updated and finished loading, OnceConnect provided a complete and smooth-scrolling stream of my activity across all 3 sites. Updates contain a profile picture, username and service on one like with the status update or picture in a second line. Clicking on an update opens a new window in Mobile Safari within whatever service provided the update.

Overall the stream functionality of OneConnect works well and it would be a worthwhile application with only the social aggregator and status update tools. If Yahoo can integrate Facebook user information into their contact list, it could also become a powerful centralized messaging tool like Facebook mobile. However, given how well Facebook mobile’s contact management is and my preference for experiencing social websites separately, I think I’ll stick with separate applications for the time being.

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