14 DAY TRIAL // Palo Alto, Calif.-based Topix LLC has just issued an official statement announcing the release of a Topix application for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, even though the company’s app lists iTunes availability since November 22.
“Today, Topix, the web’s largest platform for local influence, released its latest iPhone app, enabling people to post on its forums from their mobile devices,” reads the official announcement.
“The Topix.com forums, the home of local voice on the web, are now available on your iPhone! Quickly and easily log into the Topix forums, read and reply to threads, or start your own,” the app’s iTunes App Store description goes.
The developer explains that users can talk with their “neighbors” in a local forum, or check out the most popular discussions from more than 360,000 forums.
“We'll even let you know when someone replies to your posts, so you can keep the conversation going -- even on the go,” the company claims.
Nearly 20 percent of Topix page views are mobile, Topix said, whereas 11 percent of forum comments are posted from mobile devices.
With these figures on the table, “Topix saw an opportunity to build a native app to connect the site’s existing back-end forum infrastructure to a sleek mobile interface using custom internal APIs.”
Site participants can easily log into any of the 400,000 Topix forums, read and reply to threads, get notifications for replies to their posts, or start their own discussions, as soon as the Topix app is downloaded and installed.
Topix for iPhone also dynamically uses GPS to locate the users’ nearest local forum.
“Right now, Topix sees more mobile page views in a typical day than we did in a whole month in 2008,” said Topix CEO Chris Tolles. “In order for a conversation to be meaningful, interactions must be timely. As such, we built this native app to help our users continue the dialogue – no matter where they are.”