HTC One A9 Product Ambassador – BlinkFeed, or how I became more of a social media junky.

With the last HTC phone I had (the E8) I didn’t set up BlinkFeed (the vertical scrolling list of updates/headlines from several different sources). It is like an online party with all of your social media sites in the same room. At the time I didn’t see the need for me to have it set up, and I also didn’t think I was too lazybusy to check my sites myself. As it is I only get certain Facebook notifications (events, messages etc) right away. Most of the “likes” and such I only will see if I open up the application. I don’t need to be that connected, right?

I have set up BlinkFeed on the A9, and although it has taken a few tweaks to get used to – it is now the feature I check most often on my phone. It is neat to see what the application thinks I would find interesting – and it shows different things from the news feeds in the actual tools.

BlinkFeed has a real variety or services and app’s that it can provide for your feed: News, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mealtime recommendations, Tumblr and Twitter.

At first I had all of them selected (well I am not on Flickr or Tumblr) – but even all of the rest just seemed way too chaotic for me. I have since simplified and now just have Facebook, LinkedIn and Google +.  I have the Chicago Tribune application for my news (it’s more local). And as for Instagram and FourSquare – I didn’t see the need to have “food envy” all day long.

Do I get all the updates that I need? No. Do I get updates that I would have missed? Yes (and maybe that is because I am checking the BlinkFeed more than I would have checked the individual applications, but who knows).  I am still playing with the different settings (The Tips and Help section in the settings is very helpful) and finding things I wouldn’t even have thought of!

Do you use BlinkFeed? What do you think?

Disclaimer: The Product Ambassadors are Sprint employees from many different parts of the company that love technology. They volunteer to test out all sorts of Sprint devices and offer opinions freely to the Community. Each Product Ambassador shares their own opinions of these devices, therefore the information in this post does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Sprint. The PA's do not represent the company in an official way, and should not be expected to respond to Community members in an official capacity. #sprintemployee