Exclusive App Preview: Incredible! for webOS 57

webOS Developer Geoff Gauchet (aka @zhephree) has brought plenty of goodness to us all, most famously with his FourSquare app and Neato! for shooting data to and from webOS devices and computers. For his next trick, Gauchet is planning on bringing a new app called Incredible! that will serve as an aggregated social media reading tool.

Incredible! will pull in Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Flickr, Gowalla, Picasa, Delicious, LinkedIn, YouTube, Untappd, and, yes, a few other streams into a single unified app. Rather than try to be a full-featured client for all of these services, Incredible! will focus on providing a single way to read your entire social stream in an interface that is able to give you all those services in something actually readable.

There have been attempts to do similar things on other platforms (MotoBlur on Android comes to mind) and even on the desktop. Based on the screenshots and plans for the app, we're optimistic that Gauchet just may have done a better job than any of them. Read on for our exclusive preview of Incredible!

The idea of pulling all those different social media services in one app seems, well, like a potential nightmare. To resolve that, Incredible does a few clever things. First, if the same status update from a contact shows up in multiple services (ex. Twitter and Facebook), the app automatically combines them. If the update does come from multiple services, when you reply you can choose which service to reply with, as at right.

Furthermore, Gauchet is building in a complex rules system that allows you to color code based on certain criteria. For example you can set all the messages from a Twitter contact to be red, all the messages that contain the word "webOS" to be green, etc.

The rules bits look like they'll take quite a bit of work to fully customize and set up, but for social media hounds the result of all that work will be a single stream of status messages that will be very easy to quickly scan through for the content you care about.

In terms of display, Gauchet says that he's not quite done with making things look awesome. However, images and videos are included inline.

In terms of further functionality, you can drill in further to any item to comment or like. You can also do basic posting as well, but Incredible! is designed to compliment other apps like Bad Kitty or Facebook rather than replace them. Incredible! will include groups, which will let you update multiple accounts at once. You can create multiple groups for posting - so for example you could have a "Local" group with FourSquare and Gowalla, "Photos" with Flickr and FaceBook, etc.

Finally, Incredible! will also automatically determine the top ten trending topics in your entire social graph, functioning just like Twitter's trending topics but personalized to your stream and working across all the networks you've configured.

In all, it looks like a pretty great tool for social media hounds, though at this stage perhaps a little overcomplicated for those who just use Facebook and are only dipping their toes in Twitter. It's definitely an app we're going to keep our eye on. No word yet on when Incredible! will be released, but let's hope it won't be long.