I’ve been writing a lot about Oink, the new mobile app from Milk, Kevin Rose’s current startup. Oink launched about ten days ago (you still need an invite to unlock all of its features), and Kevin Rose gave me a demo the day it launched. In this episode of Fly or Die, we give Oink a try.
Oink is a way to rate things in the physical world on an extremely granular layer. You can rate a #burger or a #steak in a restaurant, a #rollercoaster in an amusement park, or a #shirt in a clothing store. You identify things with hashtags and get cred topic-by-topic based on the how other people vote for the things that you’ve said are good. The hashtags are also useful for a specific hashatag that’s been rated in your vicinity.
The app could end up collecting a wealth of data about what people like in the real world. There is something very satisfying about seeing the best 25 #burgers in rank order within a 5-mile vicinity drop down on a map. And the ability to level up for any particular tag is going to be a big motivator for some users. But like any app, there will be the power taggers and everyone else (who simply consume), and the trick for Oink to be successful when it launches more broadly will be to make it appealing and easy to use for anyone straight out of the gate. It might need more structure and suggestions than the current open-ended tag the world approach.
Milk is a mobile development lab founded by Kevin Rose, Jeff Hodsdon, and Daniel Burka. Milk has announced its first mobile app, Oink, released last fall. The company has since been acquired by Google.
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