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What Location Service Are You?

Posted on 19. Sep, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Mobile

Why would you want to share your location? There are many answers to this question and mostly it depends on the situation and the personality.

1) The Socialite. If what you’re looking for is a twist in your social life, Loopt offers a few options: you can meet up with your Facebook and Twitter friends, find new Yelp hot spots, or go for a blind date with someone who matches your profile (Loopt Mix). The location service, which was once featured by Apple in its Iphone TV commercials, is not the only one in the category. Whrrl, with a recently revamped 2.0 version repurposed around your social “stories”, and BrightKite are close competitors. But what makes Loopt different is that it is now the only Iphone app that can run in the background. Which means that it will notify you if anything noteworthy is going on, without your checking in. Loopt’s other advantage is that it supports many platforms and has a deep integration with a few carriers.

A similar service but with a gaming component that tries to make it more addictive is provided by FourSquare and Gowalla. The more you check in, the more points and social acknowledgments you earn. As with all games, the risk is that people tend to get tired of them. But for now, we’re in full FourSquare season.

Last entrant in the game is Nokia with Facebook and the new “lifecasting” service. Needless to say that the day Facebook adds location to its mobile service, most of the competition’s dreams might be swept away.

2) The Selective Sharer. As with everything, there’s always a Google solution to the problem. In this case, it’s called Latitude and it’s a service built on top of Google Maps that lets users share their location with their Gmail contacts. There are different levels of personalization available: you can share your best location or just the city info. Or you can decide to hide yourself from a contact, in case you don’t want her to know where you are. Latitude is an app that works on most smartphones and on the PC and is also an embeddable widget.

3) Just Tell Me Where You Are! With all the above mentioned services, in order to start sharing your location, you have to create a profile (Loopt, Latitude-Gmail, FourSquare) and import your contacts. Various opt-in features remind you as a safety guard that you are “overexposing” yourself (e.g. a weekly reminder from Latitude).  Glympse is tackling the location problem from a different perspective. The service, just recently show-cased at Mobilize 09, allows you to broadcast your location on an as needed basis and without having to befriend anyone. You download the app (for now on your Android phone), and when you need to let someone know where you are, you send a SMS or an email with a link. The person can click the link and see on a map online where you are and keep tracking your whereabouts. But for a limited period of time that goes from a maximum of 4 hours to a few minutes.

So, what location service do you use?

Tags: Location Sharing Apps