Loopt Jumps Ahead Of Facebook And MySpace On iPhone. Told You. | Hacker News Reader

Loopt Jumps Ahead Of Facebook And MySpace On iPhone. Told You.

techcrunch.com

27 pointsjmorin00712 comments

What competitive advantage does Loopt have over Facebook and MySpace? It's unthinkable that they both don't already have location based services in the works.

What happens when people open up FB one day and it has a "Map" tab? Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems that the general population is already so plugged into Facebook that when they release a similar service it will be game over for Loopt.

Loopt is small. Facebook is big. The phone companies will only let small people into their house. They'll have a much harder time getting deals done.

I was going to post something along the lines of "hopefully the mobile industry will follow Apple's lead of removing the power from the carriers" then realized Apple just transfered the power to themselves. Though I would consider them the lesser of two evils.

They are the lesser of the two evils because they have a commitment to pleasing most of their customers. It could be, though, that they are so committed to this because of the need to compete with the 800 pound gorilla Microsoft.

"Location aware" is the most over hyped nonsense since tag clouds IMHO. Sick of it.

Location is significant, period. It may be over-hyped. But so was the web on several occasions. Sometimes something gets over-hyped because it has tremendous potential to begin with.

It's significant if you want to find something. That need is already pretty much fulfilled.

You can't just tack "location aware" on to existing products and make them out to be revolutionary, unless they really are revolutionary and satisfy as specific need.

It's like people have been given a new toy - location, and are tacking it onto everything. Like a web-designer who has just found the <blink> tag.

I am very tired of people like you

Awesome. Loopt very much depends on network effects to be useful, so hopefully this will help them get a critical mass.

Now they just need to figure out how to update my location without requiring me to open the app...

TC might be getting a bit excited here. Loopt could just be receiving a bounce from the Apple commercial...

Surely thats the case. I don't think snagging an iPhone commercial puts you ahead of facebook or myspace in the mobile space. I don't even really think you can compare the two.

The only way I access FB nowadays is via iPhone.

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