From the likes of Yahoo's FireEagle and Google's My Location, here's perhaps the most advanced social location sharing service I know of: it's called wizi, and I've been testing it with a borrowed pda (an HTC p3300) from TimeBi - the guys behind the service - for the last 2 months. And, well, it's quite cool!

Let me describe a little bit wizi:



It's a social network focused on sharing your location with your friends on a map, on your mobile phone or on any browser. It can detect your location automatically by GPS or by cell tower id (limited number of cities only so far). It can harness the whole community geo-tracks for later analysis and extraction of traffic stats - Notice that it preserves at all times your privacy and unique identity, as is stated in the end-user license agreement -. Hence, the more people use it, the better it gets! But you can also set your location manually, in case you aren't the owner of a (rather still-too-expensive) gps-enabled, smartphone (such as myself).

But more, much more... You can save the usual places where you hang. You can search your friends and see where they are. You can send them an instant message. You can arrange for an instant rendez-vous. The Wizi-engine has the unique feature of estimating how much time away you are from your places and your friends. It displays a little clock on the sidebar, permanently showing you how far away in time you are from your dear ones. The Wizi-folks call that the "time-tag". Quite cool. You can "flash" places and stuff, which means: take a wizi-shot with your camera and upload it geo-tagged on the wizi-map for your wizi-friends to see. Here are my flashes and places for you to get a hint at what you can do with wizi. And last, but not least, there are rumors from the wizi-folks, behind the scene, that an API (twitter fashion) is underway. That would be really something!

I wrote here my feelings on my first urban-hiking experiment with geo-aware devices here. I could feel for the first time what might get to be the truly killer app for a mobile web-based device: ubiquitous web access + presto-location awareness.

The service is free to use for anyone on a browser or on a mobile device (check compatibility list of devices here). The service is on beta for quite some time now (formerly known as Time2Me), though it felt a lot more of an alpha to me. However, the latest release, as of this post, provides a smoother mobile client and simpler looking browser interface and is a true beta by now, so it's well worth while the experience from a user-perspective.

In my opinion, wizi is a serious contender for a mobile device killer-app. However, like any other hard-paced social-network, it depends a lot on the network effect it gets. Barely short of a thousand registered users yet (but doubling every month since the service started) the wizi-folks will still require a lot of word-of-mouth before they can attain a sustainable growth. But, from what I could tell from our quick interviews at their Lisbon office, they are on track, with focus on how to get there AND they are eager to get feedback from their users - in 2 months, I only wrote a couple of posts: I could tell they were a little bit disappointed, but if they keep comin' new features, I will keep those write-ups pop'in-. The service is cool enough as it is. Looking good. But... I didn't had any friends to share things with, so I experimented the tech-part of wizi only, and not the social part. So, it all depends on you now. Have you already tried wizi? Do you know of any other app like wizi? What are your thoughts about it? I'd love to hear from you. And I know, for sure, they would too ;)