Aaron Landry

It’s been more than a day now since Apple released iPhone OS 2.0 and released the new iPhone 3G. With GPS and the ability to add third-party applications, mobile social networking tied with location information may finally take off.

As many of my friends and readers know, there’s a real soft spot in my heart for Dodgeball. It was created way back in 1874 or something and bought out by Google a few decades or so later (okay, about 2000 and 2005, but it feels that old). Dodgeball was the first mobile service that told your friends where you were. Even though there is no longer any active development on it, it is still one of the best, most reliable and most simple services to use from most mobile phones. There’s one other service that might be more simple than Dodgeball but doesn’t currently have location information (for the most part): Twitter.

A frequent joke about all these new services coming out is “if it’s harder to use than Dodgeball, it will fail.” Some technology-minded friends might laugh at the joke because Dodgeball is as simple as saying “@turf club” or “@town talk diner” and you’re done. It’s not so much of a joke though because I actually believe it. My idea of a successful mobile social networking application is one where you can actually spend your time being social. If I’m at a bar or music venue with friends and I need to stick my nose in my phone for more than 30 seconds to make it work, I’m not going to use it half the time if at all. Lastly, if it is not easy for the non-techie to use, those non-techies won’t use it. What good is a social network if it’s all nerds like me?

I took a bunch of the new iPhone social networking applications for a spin. There’s a bunch I’ll skip because I want to cover the most popular ones.

Limbo

Limbo might be the most thorough and detailed mobile social networking site I’ve ever used. In fact, it blows my mind how big it is. It has everything from telling your friends where you’re at, where you’re going, being categorically specific about the type of activity you’re doing, being specific about when you are starting and stopping activities and even selecting if specific activities you are doing throughout the day are ones you do or do not want to be disturbed during. You can search for other members based off of what kinds of activities you are doing right now. You can search for restaurants, bars and shops near you, you can play social networking games, subscribe to events, weather, tips, sports scores, horoscopes and the like and even accrue points that you can earn stuff with.

Holy crap, I just want it to know where I am and find my friends. In the photo at the top of this post I show a three screenshots. The one on the far left is Apple’s implementation of Google Maps with GPS, which is fantastic. In the middle is Limbo telling me where I am: “It looks like you’re in the Minneapolis, MN area.” Yeah, no shit.

The interface looks nice but isn’t very intuitive on some of the basics. For example, when I click “Find Me,” I don’t need it to give me a dialog box. There’s separate “who” and “what” sections that both list my “Faves,” “Friends,” “Contacts” and Members” but I still can’t remember if I go to the “Who” or the “What” part for different tasks. I still can’t figure out how to change my profile photo. The default it gave me was a scene of smokestacks and smog! Is that supposed to mean that I’m polluting their service?

Lastly, this application takes time. There’s a learning big curve and it takes a lot of time to do anything with it. I can see, though, that if you live in Limbo’s world it could become addictive. I’m uninstalling it though.

iFob

iFob is a simple application that finds people using the same WiFi network you are on that are also using iFob. It alerts you and you can see the basics about them such as their first name, a one-line comment from them and their photo. From their site:

In public hotspots the isolation gets so thick it chatters and hums: people sitting behind their computer screens not meeting — typing email and chats, and clicking through profiles of virtual, distant people. iFob changes this. iFob only shows profiles of people who are so close that they can look up and smile at each other.

An old idea internationally but something that hasn’t taken off here. The application seems simple enough, but I haven’t found anyone using it yet. I’ll keep it on for awhile.

Whrrl

Whrrl comes across as one of the biggest up and coming players but I’m not sure why. Every time I use it I get frustrated. When I use the map, I can’t zoom in or out. In fact (as shown by the screen capture in the top photo on the right), my street is missing! When I show a list of what’s near me, it shows “Auto Mart,” “Honda Town,” “Taco Bell,” “Nielsen Framing Studios” and “Adprint,” none one of them places I’d ever meet up with friends at. When I hit the “current location” button an option comes up if I want it to identify my current location or not compared to the Maps application where it just does it.

In fact, I can’t seem to get anything to work the way I want it to in Whrrl. I gave up and started playing with Whrrl with a browser. Even if it knows my last location as being at home in Minneapolis it says:

Welcome Aaron!
What are you doing right now?

Where in Seattle, WA are you?

Weird. I’ve never been to Seattle in my life. I’m uninstalling it.

Brightkite

Oh wait, Brightkite didn’t release an iPhone application! They have had, however, a ton of hype amongst the tech crowd. They’ve successfully deployed a private beta invite strategy that got a lot of people excited about it and on paper, Brightkite looks perfect: you can declare your location by a specific place, an address or just a city, you can manage your privacy settings and select who gets to know to what detail about your location you want to share and you can attach photos to what’s going on at the location you’re at.

My problem with Brightkite is that it isn’t even close to passing the “is it as easy as Dodgeball?” litmus test. Even their iPhone-friendly website takes too long for me to even check in somewhere. That, and their preferences take a lot of time to go through to get everything just right. The defaults are way too noisy and bombard you with a ton of text messages even if they aren’t your friends nearby. The good news is that the preferences are granular enough for people extremely interested in the service but why not make some good defaults so it is friendlier for everyone else? I figured a nice iPhone application would fix all of this. Where is it?

Brightkite had a lot of hype and now they’re missing the boat.

Twitterrific

Twitterrific, the popular application for Twitter, will supposedly use (at some point) location-aware features that exist with Twitter’s API but are not widely used yet. It doesn’t matter to me much because Twitterrific has two serious faults that prevent me from using it: the UI can be jerky but more importantly it doesn’t pull any of the messages on Twitter between the last twenty and those from the last time I loaded Twitterrific. It is mostly a limitation of from Twitter, not Twitterrific, but it is still pretty important. Once they clean things up and location-aware features are more widely used on Twitter, Twitterrific might be a big player in this arena.

Loopt

True story: The first time I opened Loopt after setting it up initially, it automatically found where I was and put my friends that were nearby on a map. I saw my friend Dave was a few blocks away so I texted him and we went out for beers.

That, my friends, is how this shit is supposed to work.

Loopt has been getting some great plugs from Apple and for good reason: they’re the one mobile social networking application you should get for your iPhone. Or Blackberry, even. (By the way, it humorously shows the Motorola Razr on their site but it actually isn’t supported.)

Loopt, like most applications of this type use your mobile phone number as your primary user ID. While some people may argue against this as a privacy issue, I think it is a great assumption: if you aren’t comfortable giving someone your mobile number you probably shouldn’t be comfortable with that person knowing exactly where you are all the time.

Loopt, by the way, doesn’t show friends-of-friends or random people in the area.

Wherever you are at, you can also give a short message about what you’re up to, similar to Twitter. It can give your friends a good idea of what you’re doing at a particular location. You can easily take and attach a photo of what’s going on too. It logs it with your location without needing to think about it.

On the map screen, in addition to your friends you can overlay search results for restaurants, bars and other places. That portion is powered by Yelp, which completely negates needing to download the separate Yelp application because the integration is fantastic. I saw a friend of my map and was able to find a great place to meet that was almost equidistant to our locations.

The integration with other iPhone apps is great as well. If it sees my friend on the other side of the city, you can choose to have it use the Maps application to give you driving directions to where they are. You can easily call or text your friend directly from the application as well.

Loopt isn’t without its faults though, but only the kinds of things that’ll likely clear up in a minor version release.

The “Map” page is powered by Microsoft Virtual Earth. While there may be a few advantages compared to using Google Maps, it is clunky for zooming in and out on the iPhone. If you zoom in on a location, the center of where you zoomed ends up not where you’d expect. Sometimes it screws up and throws my view into the Caribbean Sea! Sometimes, as shown in the screenshot above on the right, the address and the map don’t match up. It seemed like my friend Brian was only a couple blocks away but the address indicates otherwise. So the map is a bit clunky but overall hasn’t been too bad.

The “List” page view gives the option of viewing my friends by how close they are to me or in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order doesn’t do too much for me because I am usually not concerned with my friends out of state. Viewing by “Distance” makes sense, but it shows some pretty stale entries. As I’m looking at my phone now, it is showing me some friends that haven’t updated with Loopt for more than 8 hours. I wish it’d grey those entries out, not show them at all or otherwise indicate that the data is stale and quite possibly inaccurate. Thankfully for now, it does show a time-stamp in small print.

The friend invitation portion of Loopt has a big quirk I’d like to change: It shows your address book and you can choose who you’d like to invite to be your friend. You can also have it search your address book to find if any of your friends are already on Loopt. If you use that feature, by default it selects those people as wanting to receive an invite and you have to deselect them. This is a serious problem if you have people in your address book that you don’t necessarily want to friend on this service. My friend Justine just made a mistake because of this issue. I’d like an option to permanently block those people I never want to add on Loopt or have it never default to send an invite to anyone.

Overall though, those are mostly minor UI bugs and such. Well honestly, I’ve had it crash too. And Dodgeball co-founder Alex Rainert today expressed his disappointment with it. Even with those things, Loopt is still a good version 1.0 app for iPhone OS 2.0 and it’s my favorite of the bunch. I think they have a real chance to become huge because Loopt is easy to set up, very fast to use and it’s simple. You use it to find your friends then you put it back in your pocket so you can be social. If you haven’t already, download it and try it out.