With the addition of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in the new iTunes store there are many new social apps that leverage location aware technology. Techcrunch has a nice overview of several, including Loopt and Limbo:
Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.…
Limbo – Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.
I think of both as the 2008 versions of Dodgeball, a mobile social networking service developed by two guys at ITP years ago, that was acquired by Google in 2005, and left to dwindle until the founders quit Google in 2007:
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:
* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.
* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.
Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.
