Loopt and other Location Aware iPhone Apps

After having read quite a bit about Loopt over the past year or so, I must say that I was pretty excited to see them offer a free iPhone application of their product. Free and iPhone being the critical components here… the hell if I was going to switch over to Boost mobile, and I am not so sure that I’d be willing to pay for Loopt, at least not yet.

As soon as Apple opened their app store I loaded every application I could find that looked like it might make cool use of location awareness, and I must say that after playing around with quite a few, Loopt certainly seems like the best so far… not including the Google powered maps application that comes standard.

But before I get too far along in my experiences with the various applications, I think that everyone that is currently making a living or hoping to make a living in the world of LBS, needs to drop whatever they’re doing and personally write a hundred thank you notes to Steve Jobs and all the staffers over at Apple that made location awareness such an important part of the iPhone (for the computer geeks among us, the thank you notes are that stack of little square pieces of paper that your grandmother gave you that you stuck in the bottom drawer of your dresser).

Ok so with that out of the way, there are a number of finder applications available for the iPhone and they’re all trying to do something slightly different: find friends, find places, find events, etc. From the initial batch that became available with the launch of the app store I tried Loopt, Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl, Where, EarthComber, Limbo and Nearby.

The only ones that I still use today are Loopt and Yelp.

You can tell from using the application that Loopt has been doing this for a while, and has learned the pain points for consumers and has done a great job of streamlining and simplifying the interface… there is a difference between complexity and power that I think Loopt gets… Loopt is not complex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

First of all, getting a new Loopt account up and rolling was super easy, in fact it was so quick and painless that I’ve long since forgotten exactly what I had to do, I think it was just supplying my phone number and maybe a password… but I remember going from tapping on the icon to having a new account in well under a minute, and that’s all that matters.

Next it allows me to add friends either by typing in their phone number or going through and selecting friends from my iPhone contacts… again a very easy process.

The maps are provided by Microsoft Virtual Earth and are great quality and easy to navigate around through one finger panning and zooming, and they’ve partnered with Yelp to help beef up the POI listings and reviews.

Updating your friends on “What’s Up” is another simple 2 step process, just click on “What’s Up” and “Update” or feel free to add a blurb or photo (either from the camera or from your saved pictures) about what you’re up to.

But the coup de gras, is the link you can create with a Loopt Facebook widget. Once you’ve added the application to your Facebook account and linked it with your mobile application, all of your updates feed into your Facebook account and show up on your wall. This is important for me because at this stage in the game finding friends that can or want to get Loopt is not easy, so being confined just to Loopt with just my tech savvy friends would be a pretty lonely experience, but the Facebook updating utility allows me to connect with my larger group of Facebook friends, even if it is just for me to post “What’s Up”… in fact I now find myself providing updates through Loopt instead of directly via Facebook.

Now I am hoping that they come out with an embeddable widget where I can add my location and ‘What’s Up’ in places besides Facebook, like the Skyhook/Loki widget.

The Others

Ok so here is a quick rundown of my experiences with Yelp, Eventful, Whrrl and Where. I’ll save the others for another post, another day:

Yelp, is also another well done and slick application, although I think they still have some work to do in organizing the information. The default categories include categories that seem random to me… are that many people really looking for coffee & tea? Maybe so but not me. And when I search for restaurants around me, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason behind the results provided, which I find frustrating… the top 10 results can be up to 20 blocks away, even when there are obviously ten restaurants closer… it seems to be taking into account quality/popularity in addition to proximity but the heck if I can figure out how to change the default setting. In reality I don’t typically get the results I want from proximity searches, although when I already know the name of the restaurant I do use the Yelp search function to get a better idea about the restaurant before committing to going.

I loaded up Eventful hoping to be able to quickly find nearby and last minute activities around the city to do with my kids, ala GoCityKids. In reality Eventful on the iPhone seems to really focus on the young hipster crowd looking for a band or show. I tried playing around with it anyway to see if I could find a upcoming and nearby college football game to go watch in the New York City area… a search for “college football’ returned some comedian’s routine under “Events” and a midtown bar that evidently was showing the BCS championship game back in January under “Venues”. I know NYC is a bad town for college football, but c’mon it can’t be THAT bad!

Whrrl and Where were non starters for me.

Where kept crashing for the first few weeks I gave it a try, I tried again more recently and it seems a little bit more stable now, but I still get error messages. Like Yelp the organization of Where seems to leave quite a bit to be desired… I am still not sure what to do with Quibblo Polls, SkyMap or HeyWhatsThat (no mountains in NYC, so I assume I don’t need that) and I’ve tried signing up for Buddy Beacon twice now with no luck. Zipcar and Starbucks locators are nice, but I don’t drink much Starbucks coffee or rent Zipcar vehicles, so don’t need those either. The application feels like one of those really slick $2 million dollar commercials for a financial services company that forgets to put the name of the bank in at the end… in other words it gets you all worked up and interested through the slick look and feel, but then forgets what the original purpose was in the first place…

Whrll gave me major password problems. I had a Whrrl account from online that didn’t seem to work on the iPhone application, so I couldn’t get into it for a while. When I did get in I remembered that none of my other friends use it and I didn’t really care what other top Whrrlrs thought about stuff in my neighborhood. So despite a nice slick application, I can’t figure out what to do with it and don’t want to hound and explain to my friend why they should get on it. So I am taking that one off.

Look out for another post on round two of the iPhone location aware apps coming soon.