Last week I made a trip to San Francisco to visit a friend and to meet my wife (she had just finished attending a conference on materials research). We then moved on to rent a car and give a tour by the Pacific coast. Real nice. Rode freeway 1 and 101, mostly, down to L.A. But I couldn't resist, and being close to so many web2.0 startups, I called upon several of them to try to meet with them, but only one really provided me a little bit of their time.
And so, I got to visit Loopt headquarters at Mountain View (in the same town as Google), just 50 minutes away from downtown SF and a day before the car-trip!



Loopt is a location-based social mobile service. It basically allows you to keep track of your locations by keeping a geo-referenced journal and to check out the locations and the comments of your loopt's friends. In addition to GPS, they use a-gps technology already existent in the u.s. territory, which basically allows you to get a quick location fix on your phone and is quite better than standard gps. Naturally, this means that they need to work tightly with the carriers and that they need to have a firm policy on security and privacy. And they do: users have full control to their data and how they want to share their location with the world.



Whereas the NYC based mobile service, sociallight, is focused on providing a layer of user generated "post-its" on places, loopt, focuses on the people, and allows friends to share comments and photos on places they've been. As I don't have a u.s. based mobile phone (though I wish I could have bought an iphone -sigh, if only those weren't sold out) I can't pay for the 2.99$ that come with the carrier billing and that provide unlimited use of the service. If I could, I would then be enabled to
1 - check on where my friends are right now and see their status/photos,
2 - explore the world nearby me by reading my friend's comments on places they've been,
3 - share my status, photos and comments on places I've been.
Also, I can receive an alert whenever a friend of mine is nearby, which is quite cool.

But the good news for non-u.s residents is that a full-fledged facebook application exists that anybody on facebook can install and enjoy!



Naturally, the facebook app is what I've used ever since, and I can tell you that it's quite clean. It is, by far, the most interesting facebook app I've experienced. Very good usability, very easy to learn and use. Can't wait to have more friends adhering to loopt!

Wish list:
1 - I'm a friendfeed/linkriver adept, so I would like to be able to have some sort of rss feed of my loopt journal (as an option);
2 - How about some twitter integration? Could be handy to receive the loopt alerts on my twitter account. To receive tweets of my friends updates and location... To hard-code my status and location on twitter and automatically refresh my loopt status...

So I would finally like to end this post by sending greetz to Eric and Min, the whole loopt team, and Bruno (the Loopt dog!), which very kindly received me. I luckily ended up just for the "everyone cook/bake and bring something for lunch" day. Yummy, will remember that mint-chocolate cake for some time. Ouh, and I also got this cool t-shirt (my wife also got one)! So I can only recommend: if you ever get the chance to drop by, give a call to loopt, or better yet, make friends with the loopt team on loopt and let them now you're nearby!