Glassmap (YC S11) Launches A Better “Find My Friends”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
there’s also a company philosophy that realtime location sharing is the future. They believe that startups like Foursquare, which requires manual updating, represent out-of-date technology.
While I'll agree that check-ins are a little messy, they represent an important difference that goes unmentioned- I check in when I want people to know where I am. At all other times, my location is unknown.
That's important to me. I don't want everyone knowing where I am on demand- not that I'm doing anything shady, but it just weirds me out and I don't see the benefit in it. Glympse and my own project, Taxonomy (http://www.taxono.my) do selective sharing- I manually choose who I want to share with, and when. For me, that's much better. But maybe I'm not representative of most people?
I do use Find My Friends for two reasons, one is to share my location with my very, very close friends (4 people) as I really don't care if they know.
Second, my wife is a teacher at an inner city school here in Atlanta. The school is located in a pretty bad area, and I like to know she made it to/from school safely.
Beyond that, I don't use it for anything else. I do find apps like foursquare/path much more interesting from the sharing a location standpoint.
(We all know what Unix people are up to: arcane invocations to fsck daemons to gain access to remote mounting privileges shudder).
When I pull Find My Friends up, I'm fairly certain it's doing exactly what this "killer feature" relay technology is doing. The app tells me when the location was last grabbed, and it appears to refresh a friends location when I ask to to rather than a continual update (where the user's phone is pushing its location). Although, I may be wrong about how the Find My Friends app works.
I think they need some new features or something to pull people from Loopt, Tagged, etc. I dont see why they couldnt do this while in school. To each their own though
I think they are positioning themselves for the ubiquity of location-based technologies.
By the end of 2013 I fully expect more energy efficient solutions to geolocation to be integrated in cellular phones or whatever we may see in terms of wireless connectivity. I also suspect there will be a social acceptance, if not necessarily embrace, of LBS. But in order to take advantage of the opportunity, they actually need to be in the field.
The technology is emerging: http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4236252/TI-announces-fiv...
It's also kind of creepy. Granted, it's opt in, but given enough social pressure lots of people who would normally not use something like this will opt in reluctantly.
The "relay" system sound ingenious though. One project I worked on last year had to do with location based messaging. The problem that we had was with battery life and the fact that updating location passively is a huge battery drain. Although it was just a proof of concept app, we probably should have spent more time looking at the problem from another angle like these guys.
(apologies if YC no longer has an interest in Loopt)