Screenfeeder Is A Gorgeous Way To Display Social Feeds On Your iPhone, iPad Or TV

Screenfeeder is a gorgeous new app for the iPhone, iPad or TV (via Apple TV’s AirPlay), which displays your social feeds on the screen from services like Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Dribble. But the interface doesn’t use columns like TweetDeck – it just flashes the updates as they arrive against an ever-changing background of images and colors. The idea may not be as practical for serious news watchers who follow thousands of accounts, sorted into multiple lists, but for the everyday user whose tweets flow a bit slower, Screenfeeder offers an attractive interface to view them in.

The app uses the background images and color schemes from your Twitter friends’ own Twitter profile pages to help you associate the tweets with who they’re from, and it even lets you track or mute hashtags as they appear by tapping on the link in the tweet. This latter feature could make the app ideal for conferences, perhaps, but the other tweets continued to flow even when you begin tracking a tag. So for that to work, you would have to use Screenfeeder from a dedicated Twitter account that wasn’t following anyone else. However, one of the app’s creators, Gernot Poetsch, tells me that in a future update, you’ll be able to deactivate all your streams and only show the hashtag streams.

For the Foursquare checkins, Screenfeeder displays a map in the background to show your friends’ vicinity, and its zoom level is dependent on how close you are to the checkin. Instagram and Dribble images are shown on top of a blurred backdrop copy of the same photo, which makes for a nice visual experience.

My only complaints are that you can’t use the app for viewing Twitter lists, and the updates sometimes seem too fast. Poetsch says that the minimun display time is five seconds – which seems like long enough – but with the ever-changing background images, which requires your brain to adjust to the new content and layout, it would be nice to slow the pace a bit. We’re told they might add a mechanism for slowing the pace in a forthcoming version.

The app was built by German design agency Edenspiekermann, and nxtbthng an app development shop in Berlin who makes the official Soundcloud iOS apps.

You can grab Screenfeeder from here in iTunes.