Biologic offers strangest way yet to browse social networks on iPad

Bored with the mundane, linear way of reading status updates? Fire up the iPad and load Biologic, a brand new app for browsing social network feeds.

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Biologic, which comes from the creative minds at data science startup Bloom Studio, is a scientific experiment in social browsing. The iPad-only application, released Thursday, exhibits an alternative interface where social media activity is symbolized in mutating life forms.

The Biologic user can connect to Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, with each existing as an independent entity. Pick a service to browse updates and you’ll quickly discover that each cell represents a person in your social network. The more vocal a contact is in a short period of time, the larger her cell. Touch a cell and you’ll find various particles, which represent individual status updates. There are four different types of particles — photos, videos, links, and check-ins — that designate the type of content contained in each update.

The application’s quirks, which include fun audio and visual effects, are quite delightful. And a little tip for the unhip (ie. folks like me): If you want to switch between your social networks, you’ll need to pinch to zoom out.

Biologic is seriously strange, but in the most fascinating of ways. “It is weird,” Bloom co-founder and president Ben Cerveny admitted to VentureBeat. “We wanted to provoke people into thinking about what these networks are and how complex and messy they can be.”

The app will captivate and delight, so long as you don’t expect it to satisfy all of your social media cravings. It’s not optimized for conversation or off-network content consumption, as links redirect to your iPad’s browser. But Biologic is still the simplest of organisms, and its creators have much more in store.

Bloom Studio is a small San Francisco-based startup dedicated to presenting social and streaming data in playful visualizations with personal context. The company has raised an undisclosed sum of seed funding.

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