Mobile Social Video Apps: What You Need to Know

Uploading video to YouTube or Facebook from your phone can be tedious. Thankfully, some apps aid this process, allowing you to capture video clips, add special effects and easily share them with your social networks. Last week, I tested three of these smartphone video apps: Socialcam, Viddy and Mobli. I found that shooting videos using Socialcam is easy and fast, but when you watch videos, the app shares what you're doing unless you know to turn off those functions. Viddy works similarly, though the app has a 15-second limit on the length of the video you share. Mobli's interface was a bit more confusing, and the app is really geared toward following celebrities and discovering videos made by people you don't know. Here's a breakdown of how these three apps work: Socialcam Socialcam is a free app, available for iPhone and Android. I tested it on my iPhone. You can sign up for Socialcam through Facebook, Twitter or an email account. After I signed in through Facebook Connect, Socialcam said it would be sharing the videos that I watched, and I had the option to select "yes" or "no." I opted for "yes," to get a sense of the full sharing features of the app, though I later had some trouble turning this feature off. There are nine filters that can be applied to your video before you begin shooting — so you don't have to wait for the effects to render afterward. There are also some options to add text, and 11 soundtrack options.

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