Nearby: The Woodstock Hippie of iPhone Apps

Ok so I was going through a couple of the other mobile location aware iPhone applications, specifically Nearby and Limbo and they couldn’t be more different. I am sure the people running these apps are perfectly well adjusted, super successful business technology professionals, but I couldn’t help conjuring up images of Woodstock hippies for Nearby and those super anal type A guys who immediately file every e-mail, take copious notes at every meeting and schedule their potty time a week in advance for Limbo. I’ll save Limbo for another day, but the fact that they needed to put a “video explanation” on their homepage is telling.

Here was my experience with Nearby.

The Woodstock Hippie
So I loaded up Nearby. Very nice and slick, and great presentation. I love the fact that you could quite easily make modifications to your current location by moving the map and not the icon, genius!

Then I thought I’d look for something… well anything. So I started by searching for a nearby Cuban restaurant by typing in ‘Cuban’ , the results were random. No sign of the Cuban restaurant literally a block or so away, but it did show me the name Margon’s at around 6th and 46th… much further uptown. To be specific… it didn’t tell me the first thing about Margon’s… just the word “Margon’s” and the helpful fact that it was “1,071 meters from you” and “posted by funkeboodha a while ago”. Now even if I was BFF with Mr. Funkeboodha, I am still not sure I’d haul my butt up to 6th and 46th (1,071 meters no less!) and give it a try based on that info.



After a web search it turns out that Margon’s is a little hole in the wall Cuban restaurant that may indeed be worth trying, but that’s not the point, it wasn’t particularly nearby (particularly versus alternatives) and didn’t give me enough information to make a decision either way.

Ok, so then I figured maybe Nearby is not a great tool for finding restaurants so let me just go with the flow and explore what’s popular with the Nearby community… maybe there is exciting stuff happening all around me that I never realized before! So I tap on the ‘Popular’ button and tap on the first little blue post it note I see nearby called ‘Tiger’ which brings me to two posts “Tiger” and “Winky”. One tap deeper I learn that Tiger is a dead cat (including a picture of him before he was dead), and that Winky seems to be an alive Persian cat that evidently got to sit in Santa’s lap this past holiday season…. And that they both live a mere 540 meters away around 32nd street, between 2nd and 3rd! Woo hoo, now we’re getting somewhere!



Ok, so moving right along, I gave it one last try by trying to explore the Nearby “collections”. A collection seems to be a set of POIs around a common them, posted by a Nearby community member… alas finally a little organization! This area seems particularly popular with people posting their favorite restaurants, buildings, and things to do for their friends to see. Besides many personal favorite things to do and and see, nearby collections for me included Great Buildings (5 in total in NYC including Chelsea Market), Important Protests (2 in total), Grand Tour Architecture (3 in total). Lame, Lame and Lame.

So you can see why visions of hippies come to mind… I can hear them now… “aw sure man, it’s cool, you can post anything you want man, anything! No rules at all, if you want to make a map of all the places where you and Yoko did sit in’s in 1965 and quit halfway through go right ahead… it’s all cool man. No worries”

And that is exactly what you get, a big muddy mess.
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Centralized versus Edge Storage For POI information, the Akamai Model

I’ve been an avid follower and fan of a company called Akamai for a number of years now. Many people mistakenly view Akamai as merely a video streaming company that helps media companies deliver video on the web, and while this is true, the company delivers a lot more that just video… they deliver all sorts of web traffic/assets to your browser…. Html, flash, images, etc.

When you hire Akamai you’re generally looking to 1. ensure that a user anywhere in the world can load your website quickly while 2. avoiding the unnecessary expense of buying extra servers to be able to handle rare peak traffic periods and a geographically diversified user base.

Akamai provides their service by storing files that make up your web site out on the edges of the network, not one time at a single central server, but with many copies of your site on many severs physically close to the user, maybe just a few miles from your house or office, to minimize network traffic and the latency, problems and congestion that ensues. That sounds like a herculean task, until you learn that approximately 80% of the U.S. population lives in urban areas which make up just 3% of the land area... then it seems a little more doable, although still impressive.

Knowing how Akamai works and the correlation between physical proximity and performance, makes for an interesting questions about the best way to communicate location data about points of interest (POIs) to the nearby users of mobile device that are location aware.

Let me first clarify, err steal from Wikipedia, what the heck a POI is, from Wikipedia it’s “a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting” . Most people think of things that are always there like businesses, parks and government building, etc that are useful to everyone when talking about POIs. But in my mind POIs also include locations that may be of interest to a select few like a geocache, or only of interest for a two hour window because an event may be happening there, or even just for an instant because some thing of interest passed by that point.

So with POIs that don’t move, are ‘always on’, and are applicable to everyone, here is how it works currently. Let’s say that there is a Wendy’s at the corner of Main St and Maple Avenue, over time the presence of that store gets recorded in the various databases of folks like Acxiom and InfoUSA and then into Navteq, TeleAtlas and on into Google Maps, Y! Maps, and Virtual Earth as well as Garmin and TomTom PNDs for consumers to find. And if the Wendy’s closes or moves, slowly over time the old listing will make its way out of the system after someone drives by or tries to call Wendy’s and notices it is no longer there and updates the database. The biggest problem with the current system for these types of POI’s, is that the information is often static and stale… gathered by an outside observer at a point in time, typically way in the past.

The biggest problem with the current centralized storage system for all other types of POI’s is that it just flat doesn’t work.

So what is the solution? Well what about storing POI location information locally, out at the “edge”, in mobile location aware units at the physical point of interest that can wirelessly broadcast out their presence and details about what they are (a store, event, a bus, a hotdog cart) etc to other nearby mobile location aware devices (ie phones) and cut out the middle man and all the headaches in the process.

I am sure there are a thousand reasons why it would never work, but heck I’d love to start hearing some of them.

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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.

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