HeyLetsMerged

I always need to get out more. Working at home in the Bay Area has its perks, but it can also leave me a bit stir-crazy by the end of the week. But actually breaking out of a routine can be harder – after all, it’s way easier to get food from a favorite restaurant than to try out someplace new.

Lucky for me, Heylets just dropped on the App Store. It’s a free app for the iPhone that’s designed to help people figure out what they want to do by giving them access to a variety of user recommendations for different experiences.

The app itself is built around users sharing experiences, rather than writing full reviews of a place. Users add a photo, plus a 180-character description of the experience, and upload it to the network. Those bite-sized descriptions are supposed to be a more mobile-friendly way to handle recommendations than a multi-paragraph review.

IMG_2248After signing up, Heylets will ask users about their interests, and use that to build a portfolio of places it thinks they’d like. Users can follow other people on the service, or just choose to browse the app’s recommendations. When browsing, they can look at a variety of suggestion feeds, including recommended and trending experiences, as well as suggestions from people they follow.

Users can also search for particular keywords, and filter their feed by category to find what they’re looking for.

I’ve been testing the app since it entered public beta several months ago, and it has given me some great ideas about where to go and what to do when I happen to have a free evening here and there.

Foursquare is trying to do something similar with its app, but I prefer Heylets’s implementation. The experiences Heylets shows off are dynamic and visual, compared to Foursquare, which prioritizes location info and keeps tips separated from any images they’re connected to.

Overall, my favorite thing about using Heylets is that it’s actually fun to use. Yelp has always felt like work to me, sifting through complaints from people decrying a lack of good service and picking apart how a restaurant sources its food.

By design, Heylets focuses on sharing great stuff. The character limit on recommendations encourages users to keep things short and sweet, and the community thus far has focused on highlighting experiences they love. When a new post shows up from someone I follow on the service, I know it’s going to be something they find cool, and that’s what keeps me coming back.

Like a lot of new social apps, Heylets’s biggest problem at the moment is a relative lack of content compared to other providers like Foursquare and Yelp. Usually, a popular venue will only have one or two experiences attached to it, while also sporting hundreds of Yelp reviews.

At the same time, people who enjoy reviewing things and who want to get in on the ground floor may be able to pick up a big following thanks to having their reviews on the service first.

Overall, though, I’m a big fan of Heylets, and I think it has a place on everyone’s iPhone. Realistically, that’s the only way it’ll see a critical mass of recommendations, too.

Heylets is available for free on the App Store.

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