Here are some location based tools that I use on the iPhone. Some are social canvas, some are useful tools.

Google Maps

I use it to:

  • Locate me.

  • Search places.

  • Bookmark places.

  • Find routes.

  • Navigate.



Unique features:

  • Built in iPhone.

  • Street view (coming to Europe, one country at a time).

  • navigation system.



Google Earth

I use it to:

  • locate me.

  • search places.

  • do 3D earth exploration.

  • browse nearby Wikipedia and Panoramio entries.



Unique features:

  • 3D flight mode.

  • Gyroscope sensor view tilting.

  • Wikipedia and public Panoramio layers.



Firefone

I use it to:




Unique features:

  • location brokering service. "Update once, update many" feature.



Here I Am
I use it to:

  • Mail my location.

  • Keep a mail record of my tracks.




Unique features:

  • Sends an email with my textual gps coordinates from the touch of a button.




Wizi

I use it to:

  • Locate me.

  • Bookmark places (private).

  • Add friends (private).

  • Share my location (mail, friend, friends or public).

  • Locate friends.

  • Send direct messages. Reply.

  • Navigate (to places and to friends).

  • Journaling (Picture, text. Private and friends-only).





Unique features:

  • Know how distant I am from my friends and from my places by looking at the timetag.


Wizi tries to do everything: Social networking, instant messaging, journaling, navigation. This approach can be risky though, as other more specialized tools may out-perform it. It started as a navigational tool to reach friends by leveraging on user-provided tracking data. This is still, by far, it's greatest asset. A distinctive approach would be to add value to my iphone/gmail contacts, by providing my current location to my contacts and by providing the current location of my contacts. This is what I'm really excited about Wizi. But the Wizi team has to slowly adjust and fine tune their service as they need to compete with traditional navigation systems and typical conversational journaling services. If they want to compete with Brightkite and Loopt, they also need to refine their conversational canvas so users can engage more. So far the Wizi client still isn't released on the App store, and I only got access to it as private beta tester. But you can download it on many other platforms such as windows mobile and blackberry. An Android version is also being developped.

Brightkite

I use it to:

  • Locate me.

  • Bookmark places (private, friends-only, public).

  • Add friends (private, friends-only, public).

  • Locate friends.

  • Share my location (private, friends-only, public).

  • Conversational journaling (text, picture. Private, friends-only, public).





Unique features:

  • Best UX for a micro-blogging/journaling platform.


Brightkite does one thing and does it well: it's a location based micro-blogging/journaling platform with a clean interface and a good user experience. It provides a conversational canvas to engage with the community. It's biggest threat is the fact that it doesn't works two-way on the importing/exporting of data. Neither with location, neither with pictures, neither with micro-posts. Thus, I'd rather send a tweet with a link to a picture to engage conversation, than make a brightkite journal entry. However, it does provides an RSS feed for the journal so you can still pipe it to Twitter, to Facebook or to Friendfeed.

Loopt

The problem with Loopt is that it isn't available out of the US (and perhaps Canada). So I really can't go in depth with it. For all I know, it's very similar to Brightkite and, thus, it's based on the journaling concept. However it integrates with Facebook quite nicely (two-way) and it also integrates with Twitter while providing an RSS feed. These features alone make Loopt more "data-portable" than Brightkite. This is very interesting, as my main social-networks are Facebook, Twitter and Gmail contacts (so it's 2 out of 3 ducks).



Unique features:

  • Facebook and Twitter integration

  • U.S (& Canada?) only.




Plazes

Plazes isn't available yet for the iPhone, though an iPhone app is rumored to be underway anytime soon. The interesting thing about Plazes is that, beyond conversational journaling, it also adds a whole new social object: the conversational agenda. It's basically an agenda/calendar where you share/appoint events. The events that you actually attend get lit up, and you and your friends can always comment on them. It potentiates an integration with your calendaring tool.


Concluding remarks

So I just went through the list of location-based apps I use the most on my iPhone. We must retain that the basic social features are locating, routing, navigating, sharing location, locating friends and journaling. Each of these features have several degrees of security -private, friends-only, public-; and several radius of proximity -exact location, neighbourhood, city-. Plazes goes a step further by adding the events agending feature.

I feel most of these applications are still transient, and I still have this need to import/export my tracks data. I really think those services should work more tightly with fireeagle. Brighkite does update fireeagle, but that's it. There are also other location baseds services like Zintin and Cence me. So please let me know if you're interested to learn more about those. But I'm curious, what location-based social apps do you use?
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Labels: brightkite iphone loopt plazes wizi

Below is a screenshot of the most interesting article of 2013, period. Written by one the most-influentials "good" guys of world, Julian Assange. The article deals about the promiscuity between Google top-notch executives and the White House, and how it affects both institutions policies, at the expense of the people's freedom and will. Below the article I share with you some notes I've taken.

Assange sums it all up to us in two words: "Jared Cohen", and a question "Who is he? ". It's worth it to check him out. I googled him to find out he's a futurist thinker, thinking about the disruptive reach social networks and, now, context networks can attain, world-domination-wise. A megalomaniac thinker surely, with the wits, the will, the intuition, the perception and the goal.

Back in 2005 I was really excited about the web2.0 concepts, the web-based APIs, mashups, and all the new publishing tools that was later to be known by 2008 as "social-media". However, back then, it really wasn't the modern facebook-ish "social-media" model that was tingling my neurones; it was rather the emergent nature of these disruptive new tools such as blogs, wikis and web-based productivity apps such as Google Docs or Zoho.
1

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook ... what is the REAL future of computing, as seen from 2010?

I don't know, exactly. In my last post I simply summed up Google to an advertisement company and Apple to a leisure-time company. And indeed, I still think it is what they are, and what they focus first to become, consciously.

Somebody wrote a while ago:

Google is an advertising company that builds popular services that command large audiences.

To which I add:

Apple is a leisure company that builds popular media-platforms that command large audiences of media-consumers.

And, to my insistence, beyond games/apps, music, movies, tv-shows, books and magazines, Apple will try hard to become a vacations, travel and experiences re-seller. It's the natural next-step for them ...

I just got accepted to the most awesome workshop in the whole world, organized right here in Lisbon, the Codebits 2010, promoted by sapo.pt,

I'll be staying three days, in a row, in a big room packed with free wifi and free cable net access, unlimited free pizza, free cokes, free chocolate bars and a horde of PT finest geeks. I'll participate and assist to the biggest festival of creativity in PT geekdom. Missed it last year.

One of the biggest pain in the butt after an exciting conference/workshop/meeting is inputing all your fresh new contacts business cards info into your digital mail/phonebook. This is a problem. An unsolved one too.

Another problem, is that you don't know who, from the meeting, after you gave them your contact, actually checked you out afterwards. You can't tell how many checked on you neither.

Here's an elegant and smart solution to alleviate this problem, provided it gets widely adopted.

Android is for tasks, life-hacks, body-hacks, and Chrome is for organized data, information.

At some point in the foreseeable future I expect to see an elegant merger where a next-gen browser will be the sole platform. But first, the life/body-hacks platform will need to walk the walk it has to walk, and I expect it to be, at least, a five-years march.

Hello all, it's been a while since my last post. These last months were spent mostly dedicated to finish my unfinished thesis - Ever heard of PhD comics? No? Well, it works better than Dilbert for me. Here's a nice one ...
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