Electronic Arts has stretched beyond its roots as a game publisher by creating a social networking app for sharing music and photos.
That’s right. It has nothing to do with games. Vue is a free mobile app that EA has released on the iPhone and iPad in Canada and Australia. You can “share your life to music in an instant” with friends or relatives on the app’s own social network, where “life meets music.”
You can find songs for your photos on music services such as Rdio and Spotify. You can create “living shows” and share them with friends, add text, pin Google maps to them, and throw in special effects. If you make changes to your photos stored on Facebook, those changes can instantly show up in your “vues.”
This is certainly an odd diversification effort and the strangest part of the legacy of John Riccitiello, the chief executive who recently abruptly resigned from EA. A spokesman for EA declined comment. We hear this is a low-budget exploratory project that started with the EA Partners group.
Regardless of who built it and whether it is a good fit for EA, it certainly looks like an interesting app. I’d guess that 90 percent of my pictures are sitting idle on my computer, with no fancy slide show, captions or soundtracks to go with them.