Burpple is a Singapore-based photo sharing app with an appetite for food which launched in May this year after over a year in development. The Burpple team today has released an update to its iOS app that brings a number of new features and improvements to deliver a better experience in using Burpple. It’s a pretty big update which includes a pretty damn neat integration with Instagram.
The new version carries a new Burpple Flash Card to showcase user profiles as well as their culinary backgrounds. Users of the app can check out each other’s collection of food which can be compiled into different categories for more convenient perusal. The updated version also lets you change location details from wherever you are to make sure that the photos are tagged properly, because sometimes location tagging can be pretty wide off the mark.
The biggest part of the update however, is Instagram Connect. By attaching itself to Instagram, users of both apps need only to post photos of their food once to Instagram and they will be carried over to Burpple, which makes the entire process much more convenient. Having been considered as Instagram for food, Burpple’s latest update makes sure that all your food photos on Instagram will actually be Burrpled.
How does the app know which photos to bring over? Burpple takes advantage of Instagram’s hashtags. Photos that are tagged with #food, #burpple, or other food-related tags will be automatically identified and brought over. Burpple will bring across not only the photos but the descriptions, locations, and other tags associated with them, automatically. The only thing left to do is to Reburp the photos into their appropriate categories.
According to co-founder Dixon Chan, Indonesia has become one of the leading countries among Burpple users. We plan to find out more about this fact, but given how often Indonesians post food photos on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Path, it’s hardly a surprise that you’ll see a lot of photos on Burrple originating from the country.
When you sign up to Burpple, naturally you’ll want to find your friends from Twitter or maybe Facebook. Unfortunately, like with Instagram, Twitter doesn’t let Burpple (or anyone else for that matter) connect to its social graph, which means that if you’re looking for your Twitter friends, you’ll have to do your search manually inside Burpple. Yes it’s a hassle but it’s a limitation imposed by Twitter. Looking for friends on Burpple using your Facebook account however, poses no such issue.
A tip on finding friends: Once you’ve discovered one or two of your friends on Burpple, you can go through their follower and following lists and add them through there. Burrple also makes social discovery much easier by presenting a list of randomized suggested users from its Search tab.
Right now Burpple is only available for iOS but an Android app is in the pipeline although the team wants to nail the iOS app first. Now I’m just waiting for an app that collects photos of Asians taking photos of food.