The Perfect Location Based Social Networking Service
On our first meeting we took a look at Gowalla, Foursquare and Rally Up, and thought how can we make this better? All of them have some aspect of a game in it, you earn badges, stamps etc and Gowalla have items you can drop and pick up. The Refinement Club doesn’t find this gaming aspect very interesting, we are more focused on the useful sides of a location based social networking service, we don’t care if our friends received whatever badge, we want to know where they are!
So, no stamps/badges/whateveryouwannacallit, but a clean feed of what your friends are up to.
What do we like?
We like that Rally Up uses Google spots, including photos, and that you can make temporary spots. We want that.
Of course you have be able to make your own spots, and you can’t check in if you’re not there (almost, we’ll come back to that). We like that Foursquare allows you to leave tips/reviews/comments at spots. We want that.
Gowalla allows you to comment on check in’s and post pictures to spots, and we like. We want that.
Rally Up has something they call private spots, that is “home”, but we’d rather you can make a spot for your home that people have to request to check in to. It feels weird when someone you don’t know have checked into your home, so we want that.
So now we’ve gone through some things we don’t like (the game aspect) and some things we do like. Over to the new stuff.
We want auto-check out. So that when you move farther than x meters away from the spot you checked in at, you are checked out. That way, your friends know that they can no longer find you there.
Rally Up allows you to define your friends in different ways, if you want to receive notifications or not, if you want them to get your check in’s etc. But we want groups. So this group is my class friends, and this group is my work friends, these people are the ones I like to drink coffee with and these people I like to drink beer with, these people are in my city and these people are in that city. Like that. And people can be in more than one group of course.
Why groups? Because then you can send more than one person messages at a time. Rally Up allows messaging. We like that. But we want to send a message to several people at the same time as well. Because, let’s face it, when you want to grab a beer there are often more than one person that will do the trick.
Another thing that Rally Up allows is to check in on the way, so you can say that I’m on my way to THAT park now. We like that. HeyWay pro is a service where you can send your own location and request other people’s location without checking in at a spot. We want that as well.
So if you can categorize your friends in different groups that makes things easier when inviting people to come join you. Let’s take that a step further. Let’s form a party. Facebook events are hopeless, people just say yes and forget about it, so you can never trust people to show up to stuff they have signed up to. Why can’t a location based social networking service do a better job? Form a party, choose a spot and send your invitation. If it’s a barbeque in the park in two hours time or your 30th birthday in two months time, your friends will get an invitation complete with directions and a guest list, and they will be reminded of it when you choose to. In addition, they can check in telling you and the others they are on the way, and they can also send messages to everyone or certain people in the party.
None of the services we have looked at allows you to tag people in your check in’s, so that you can say that you are together with those people at that place, or tell someone (they get a push notification) that you are at this place and that that person should come. We want that.
Another thing that would be really nice is that if you could choose to see your friend list as a map, so that you could see who was in your area.
All these things would make organizing your social life so much easier. And of course it is FREE. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a money making prospect in this. Companies can pay to get exposure in the sense that when you check in at their spot you will be asked if you would “like to receive special offers from this establishment when you are close by in the future”. If this is something you want you get push notifications when you are in the neighborhood. The companies pay per person who subscribes.
So far we’ve only talked about the smart phone application, how does this service act in your browser?
Both Gowalla and Foursquare lets you see where anyone has checked in even if you’re not friends with them. This is possible if you know their username or if you click on the link if they share their check ins on Twitter and Facebook. We’re not a big fan of this, and thought there could be a different use for our service online.
We in The Refinement Club love statistics, and especially if they are communicated with beautiful, simple infographics. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could see visualizations of where you check in the most, a map of all the places you’ve been, be able to see how location-compatible you are with your different friends etc? So when you log in to the site of The Perfect Location Based Social Networking Service that is one of the features that will be available to you.
But the main possibility, is to actually make this your own geo-tagged diary. View by day, week or month. Keeping a journal couldn’t be easier, just comment your own check ins, date and place is already there! And if you’re not into privacy, you can give access to (some of) your friends or make it public and use it as a blog. Perfect for traveling, easy to recommend places and easy to find back! And it will put a quick end to all tedious conversations concerning WHEN or WHERE.
So what do you think?
Next week at The Refinement Club: Workflow
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