You start off with picking from 6 categories: Entertainment, Life, Money, News, People, and Sports. Within each of these categories there are many topics to choose from. And within each topic, there are sub-topics, which lead you to sometimes even more sub-topics until you reach who or what you are looking for. There is also a Search function at the bottom right hand corner to speed up the process. Once you choose your topic, you can then can view various information “rivers”: News River, Photo River, and Data River. And you can save some news articles inside the app. The information appears to be distributed by contextual search solely based upon keywords in the title or in the body of the article, which in my opinion has the potential of being a problem. Just because someone’s name is mentioned in an article doesn’t necessarily mean the article is about them or that it’s relevant to that person at all. That could be a point of contention for some, but for the most part, the information is accurate and consistent with the selected topic.

If you follow a bunch of people or various topics, you will be pinged every time there is new data that is mentioned within the Hearst database on that topic. This basically means your battery will be drained much faster from all the pinging and that of course is never good. Luckily, for this issue you can just simply turn off the pings for a specific topic. The biggest issue I have with the app is that once you choose to follow someone or a topic, you cannot delete or unfollow. The only thing you can do is edit the page and push that person further down the list, so you literally can’t see them on immediate first page. heh. Something that I think is a great feature is the Social Media integration with Twitter & Facebook for sharing and posting to your followers and friends. (However, at the time of this review the Facebook API allows you to log into your account, but it doesn’t post your article to your account.) I personally would like to see a bit more integration with services like Amplify, Posterous, Ping.fm, etc.

Overall, I would say that LMK has real potential to quickly and efficiently follow up on a movie star during your coffee break or gain some quick insight before a meeting. It’s great for getting that extra piece of news or knowledge that keeps you on top of what’s happening NOW. Hence the title: Let Me Know. That being said, there are a few things that need to be tweaked back in the Hearst laboratories to make it a bit more user friendly and fix some of the bugs within the app.

Byte Back!