Darren Murph of Gear Patrol:
By its nature, it was bound to be unsatisfying on a level where many demand satisfaction. And yet, people were captivated.
Serial has done for podcasting what apps like Twitterrific did for Twitter via social media, and what Instapaper did for read-it-later services: it has [re]-defined the medium upon which it was founded. I started listening to podcasts around this time last year. I had been following all the the usual Apple blogosphere folks via RSS, and for whatever reason, hesitated to delve into podcasting. I am not sure why. But I do know that before I really caught on, podcasting as I knew it was what college kids did to talk about things on campus. It was associated with low-budget, ill-produced audio-only shows consisting of one or two people talking about nothing. And truthfully, that is what it was for most of us who were around for the beginning. My own college had very little in the way of podcasting, but what little they did that, retrospectively, was fairly good for a college production.
Alas, I never listened back then. I do not suppose anyone could just ‘get into’ podcasting without wanting to listen to particular shows, as curating a great list of weekly listens is about as hard as curating one’s Twitter feed.
But around the same time last year when I began to look into what the medium has to offer, I was also wondering what the podcast app market was like. It was a perfect storm of sorts, since, admittedly, the idea of a new native app to check out has always tickled my fancy.
Allow me to digress a bit into my past podcasting app choices.
In late 2013, the choices for great podcasting apps was, as far as I was concerned (after tons of research, mind you) as follows:
The former was heralded for being a full-featured, cross-platform client that offered a cloud backend and syncing of podcasts. That last bit is important if you frequently delete apps and/or restore your phone. I was doing a lot of that when I was heavy into jailbreaking.
The latter was something a bit more special, and a lot more up my alley accordingly. iDownloadBlog reviewed version 1.0, and after watching it, I started using the app full-time. Supertop had done a lot of custom UI/UX. Gestures were delightful, and the app was very, VERY clean. There were practically none of the ‘power-user’ features that Pocket Casts offered.
Ultimately, I could care less about power user features. Sure, carefully crafting podcasts episode playlists based on mundane variables is neat-o. But really, I just want to listen to good podcasts without all the hubbub associated with Pocket Casts.
Around the time I discovered Neutral, and subsequently ATP, and The Talk Show, and others, I heard about Marco Arment’s then upcoming podcast client Overcast. It launched earlier this year to much fanfare, and deservedly so. It was sort of a mix between Pocket Casts and Castro, leaning a bit more toward Shifty Jelly’s implementation than Supertop’s. I have been using that since launch.
Enough of my digression.
Up until I started listening to Serial, the majority of my podcasting consisted of essentially audio’d versions of favorite blogs’ authors’ thoughts. And there was nothing wrong with that.
I started spreading my wings away from the supremely tech-only podcasts with NPR: Planet Moneyand Freakanomics. Then there was Stuff You Missed in History Class, Stuff You Should Know, and Common Sense with Darn Carlin. Next up I started following The Liturgists, after following my local church’s feed. Fathom Podcast is right up the alley of The Liturgists, and should be launching soon.
Serial is one of the latest podcasts I subscribed to, and has to be one of the best. Everything everyone has said about it is probably true. Its compelling narrative helped over 5 million listeners conquer their inner ADD for the twelve ~45 min long episodes of murder mystery action.
Season 2 of Serial is in the works. Let us hope it’s more like this sequel or this one versus, say, this one (or this one, or this one, or this one, which all sucked beyond belief).