CinchCast.com is a social network designed for uploading media-rich messages; but this is one network that’s designed to work with Facebook and Twitter, rather than against it, through its free Cinch app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
With Cinch, you can leave audio messages of any length; attach a photo, your tagged location and a 134-character piece of text. Upon publishing, your message will be streamed to your CinchCast domain, and a message with a link to your upload will be posted to Facebook and Twitter, depending on your authorization. Anyone can see your CinchCast stream if you’ve left it public, but you can specify privacy levels on albums.
Through the Cinch app for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, users can synch their existing Facebook and Twitter accounts to their CinchCast. But if you think Cinch will be something you use often, I’d recommend registering for a CinchCast account. Although I was able to post a Cinch using my Twitter account, I ran into nothing but problems after exiting the app for a bit. Cinch has since repeatedly asked for authorization to post to my Twitter, and I’ve experienced many crashes on the app’s normal login page.
Cinch’s latest update offers what it calls “simplified recording” to make publishing your CinchCast easier. I’ll admit, this is the first interaction I’ve had with Cinch and its corresponding network, but based on the Cinches posted by others—the “Search” tab displays Cinch’s public timeline—it seems that prior to this update, users were able to post updates with just text or a photo. With the current version of Cinch, I could not find a way to post a message without first recording audio. Once I had recorded something, I was taken to a publishing screen that offered more media options (photos, text, etc.).
Cinch’s biggest draw is its ease of uploading audio; however, without the option to post messages without audio (audio isn’t always practical and I think adding a blank audio message to get around the issue misses the point), I don’t see users getting in the habit of regularly using the service.
That said, if you’re looking for a place to quickly upload quality audio, Cinch makes it pretty easy.
