For the last 6 weeks I’ve been trialing some new social meeja.
You might remember me writing about Dayre back in November?
Well now it’s nearly over I thought I’d share my final thoughts on it. Dayre is primarily an iPhone and Android app (links are to the relevant app store), so although you have a web based profile (visit mine!) you can’t sign up for an account or use the site without downloading it to your phone, much like instagram I guess.
When I started using Dayre I struggled a little with how to use it in a way that I couldn’t use other social media, but after a while I kind of found my groove. The thing about it is you don’t need to worry about bombarding anyone who follows you with updates (how annoying is it when someone posts 25 instagram photos in quick succession and floods your feed, or takes over your facebook feed with thousands of pointless updates and photos?) as they’re all organised into “Days” so when you visit your feed all you see is a list of the people you follow who have updated that day, organised in order of how recently.
This means that unlike other phone apps you can get you can use it more like a diary without annoying people. If you’re at disneyland and want to post 14 photos of your kid on a ride, go ahead, no one is going to unfollow or block you for spamming their feed.
When I downloaded and signed up for the app it was pretty easy to do with no demanding every personal detail of your life. Some people have reported to me problems with it crashing (if that happens to you let me know and I can let the developers know!)
I’ve mostly used it to post photos and text updates, again, much like a diary. It also has stickers, video, which allows you to upload previously recorded video rather than only recording in app, and a geo locate tag, so you can tag photos, or just “check in” at specific places.
Each days post also comes with it’s own URL, so if you want to send granny a link to your day at the beach, or your friends a link to the day you spent at that amazing restaurant you can. This is a link to a day after my Half Marathon back in November and this is one to early December and shows the sort of thing I normally use it for. Daily outfits and what I’m eating largely! I’m also giving the 5:2 diet a try in the run up to Christmas in an attempt to counter balance some of the annual excess, and I’m starting to record how I’m getting on with that on Dayre as well.
It’s likely I will continue using this app after the project ends, though being freed from the requirement of a certain number of daily updates may mean I use it a little differently. To me it’s definitely a diary, not a blog, but as a blogger already I find it quite nice to be able to document interesting days in a way I wouldn’t do on my blog. Trips to London for specific events, or interesting days that don’t make it to the blog because of other posts I have planned will all find a home quite nicely on Dayre, and while I don’t think it will replace my use of other social media, I’ve already found it a useful addition and I think about adding things to Dayre that might not be appropriate for other places.
As a regular, non-blogging, social media user I think Dayre will be of far more use and interest that an app like instagram or twitter, just because of it’s diary function, you don’t feel so much like you’re broadcasting to people, so much as recording your daily life.
The app is free to download and if you follow either of these links from your phone it should take you to relevant app store iPhone and Android.
One of my advent calendar prizes is Ā£80 to spend at online department store Zalando and you can get 2 entries into the draw by downloading the app and following me. My profile is here, but the easiest way is probably to download the app, and then go to “explore” in the left hand menu and search retrochick (alloneword)!
This was a paid testing project, but as a side thing to it, Dayre are also offering an iPhone5 to the tester with the most followers at the end of the testing period. I normally make it a policy not to use my blog to enter competitions, and that’s not the reason I took on this testing project, but seeing as I’m already in it I might as well let you know that if you follow me I might win something too!
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