Since leaving Digg back in March, Kevin Rose has been hard at work building his next company – Milk Inc. Milk is a mobile development shop with plans to build a number of applications.
The world got its initial preview of Milk’s first application called Oink at the Web 2.0 Summit a few weeks ago. Just last week, Kevin teased his millions of fans and followers by sharing an Instagram photo submitting to the Apple iOS store. Today, Oink was officially released into the app store.
Oink offers users a mobile application for rating anything you like inside a venue. So it’s not so much about rating the venues themselves, like Yelp, Foursquare and other applications. Instead, Oink asks you to think a little more granular and literally rate anything inside a place. Users can follow various topics like beer, cocktails, outdoors, breakfast and more. You can post photos of anything you like and associate a number of tags or topics. You can also connect with your Twitter and Facebook friends and follow their latest activity.
One of the most interesting features is the idea of rating everything associated with a location so you can quickly find things worth checking out in the various categories that are nearby. So next time you are looking for a great breakfast spot, you can easily flip through recommendations by location.
On Oink, if you share photos, mini-reviews, comments or give a rating (thumbs up, down or halfway) then you can collect cred points, which is a ranking of top users by topic. This gaming element will help keep people engaged as they compete again others for topical supremacy. For example, I love breakfast and will probably share a bunch of info about breakfast. Theoretically, I shall be the king of breakfast on Oink.
Download the Oink app on iTunes – 
Right now the app is in iTunes, so you can play around with it, but to have full use of the application, you must get approved or invited. That said, you can check out most of the features without an invite, and Milk will be letting in thousands of people a day. I just got in and followed some topics (below) and will be giving the app a spin for the coming days.
Finally, if you are still interested in hearing more watch the Oink demo video.
Oink Screen-shots
