Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users, they won’t drive new users to the services because they failed to leverage the killer iPhone feature - location awareness.
The applications are pretty good mobile versions of the standard experience. MySpace, which we reviewed last week, provides users with most key features of the service, and they’ve added some nice touches like the ability to upload photos from the iPhone camera. You can download the application here (and add me as a friend).
Facebook’s iPhone app is clearly better. They had a bit of a head start with their web app last year that was at the time the finest example of an iPhone-specific website. The new iPhone app was created by the same guy - Joe Hewitt - and includes deeper integration with the phone. Tap on a friend’s name and call them. Or use the included Facebook chat application and skip those text messages. One big problem with Facebook on the iPhone - it takes forever to load and the application crawls, just like the web version.
Location? Hello?
But both MySpace and Facebook miss the real opportunity to drive usage growth on the iPhone - location awareness. The reason? Privacy concerns. The lost opportunity? Huge potential user growth and connections.
Social networks today rely on friends of friends or real world connections to drive growth. But a handful of iPhone-only social networks actually help drive new connections in the real world. And the backbone of those applications is location awareness.
I’ve written about this opportunity repeatedly in the last year. In February I speculated on the demand for an iPhone-only social network to drive real world social interactions: “I think an iPhone-only social network…would be a huge hit…if it had presence awareness and was able to tell you both where your friends are and what they are up to. And also let you meet new people around you who were open to it.”
In April I saw a demo of the new product Loopt was building for the iPhone. It had all the features I suggested, and more.
Users of these new social networks can choose to notify other users when they are physically close to them, and show a picture, first or full name, and basic profile information. If you’re both in the same bar or at the same conference, you can browse and filter other users to find a date or do a business deal.
And you know how awkward it is when you run into someone that you sort of know but have forgotten their name or what they do? Your phone can see them coming and alert you. That means you can have richer conversations with people you are acquainted with but don’t know very well.
These new social networks can help you meet new people, remember details of the people you already know, and find your friends when they’re nearby.
MySpace and Facebook are sitting on the sidelines while these new networks try to get a foothold. And it’s all because of privacy concerns and fear of litigation.
Privacy (and those pesky Attorneys General)
The media loves nothing more than to talk about sexual predators lurking around the big social networks. Both MySpace and Facebook have had to make big changes to their privacy policies, particularly how they set up accounts for minors. So when the product guys say “hey, let’s add a feature so that any MySpace user can see the basic profiles of any other MySpace users near them,” the lawyers freak out.
Certainly privacy rights need to be considered, and Loopt has already had some problems with unintended invites going out (although this hasn’t happened to me and I’ve been using it since launch). But they can be addressed by allowing users to opt out of showing others their location, or only showing it to certain types of people (by age range, sex, friends of friends, etc.). And minors can be permanently segmented from older age groups as well.
To be fair, both MySpace and Facebook have said they will eventually roll out location based services to help users meet each other. It’s unlikely any of the early networks will get an insurmountable lead on the new platform anytime soon, so they can take their time with their lawyers to make them comfortable. But if they wait too long, or release overly-restrictive products, that may change.
We’ll have more to say on this shortly - our goal is to have iPhone users at our meetups and conferences be able to network with each other, swap contact information, and meet new people. Hopefully by our big August Capital party on July 25, TechCrunch readers will be using their iPhones for a little social networking.
This may have been their attempt to get something in the App Store the day it launches, but they most definitely have been thinking about how to tap into the location awareness aspect of the iPhone.
True, they had plenty of time for developing this feature into their apps, but as we’ve seen, there’s been a surge in app downloading and I think they wanted to take advantage of that.
Not sure how all the iPhone apps auto-upgrade themselves (if this is possible), but they simply need to seed their app within enough iPhones, roll out the location based awareness, then all their users gain this feature.
Was at the #SDTweetup last night and three of four different specifically brought up this topic of how cool it would be to know how far away a certain person was from arriving.
it is important to note that, IM technology, Contact Management and LBS components can easily be licensed, not just built internally. This is important, because this is a market that needs to be hit prior to other larger players entering the space. So the concept is to be able to suck everyone of your business and/or personal contacts into a neutral IM client (should work ideally not just with AIM, but with all the messaging clients). Marry the IM client to Navigon’s SDK … And you have an immediate mobile social network unrivaled… Users would be able to determine who sees them and who does not’t, as well as “friends of friends “ (linked in).
So one day I happen to be at the airport, and my IM client would alert me that someone in my social network is nearby me…I would have the opportunity to “meet” / cloak / “reject” … Paid user business model for PRO features, as well as huge local advertising opportunity.
There are already many different companies in this space ie;
Appear
Ask Mobile GPS
Carmenta
Dodgeball (service)
Garmin
Ipoki
Loopt
Meetro
Mologogo
Navxs
Navizon
Skyhook Wireless
Smarter Agent
Socialight
Sprint Family Locator
Super Local
Swirl
Trackme
Trimble Outdoors
Trisent
WaveMarket
whereaboutz
Problem is as with most start-ups, they lack correct product management,business model and marketing. Carriers will always try and protect this via their “Walled Gardens”, charging a monthly fee. Why this ultimately fails to become the gorilla is because - Apps/Content just want to be free * Note how the multi-billion dollor MVNO/Ringtone business is constantly moving off-deck; http://www.tonethis.com Carriers loose because their models lock out all other carriers other then themselves (think the multi-year ongoing communication issue between Yahoo Messenger,MSN Messenger, AIM Messenger,etc) . Free + Cross Platform = Scale / Category Killer most quickly.
Loopt was suppose to rock the world with location! They failed and made a terrible first impression once users got to use the app. The app crashes, has no one on it, spams your friends and is generally a failure.
You seem to be implying that Loopt will provide you or the world with an upgrade to find people near you. This is a scary thought, can anyone else imagine how potentially dangerous that app would be? Loopt failed to provide a good / safe experience on a closed network! What will they do when it is open?! There is nothing preventing my daughter from downloading this app. Frankly I believe location requires some degree of maturity. You can’t let just anyone acress it and provide that information to others. At some point lives are literally at risk. I trust google, apple and even the old evil empire. I don’t trust Loopt.
Right. At their own peril. People ignore the iphone to their own benefit.
Michael, don’t be such a tool. Just because you love FB you cannot problaim their iPhone app to be superior to MySpace’s. You’re 100% wrong. Have you read the reviews for the two apps? Facebook has an average of 2/5, MySpace 4/5. The MySpace app is a fully featured portable version of the service and is very well done in my opinion. Contrasted the to FB app, which is lacking many features and seems to be quite buggy. I just get so tired of your constant “I love Facebook” stories, it blinds you from the truth, in this case that their app sucks big time.
On a sidenote, I do agree they both should have tried to add location services. I’m sure they will in a future release.
Uhhh….
Between iPhone and Twitter this blog is getting stale. I still come for the other posts, but how many times can I listen to you pretend that the iPhone is the only phone with GPS? BlackBerry’s will have it soon, plenty of other phones have it too, and an iPhone only social network is just a terrible idea.
Mobile only? Sure.
Oh, and Twitter’s going to eventually buy out Microsoft, because suddenly operating systems are just going to be one little feature of 160 character snippet messages that are meaningless to the non tech bloggers of the world.
TechCrunch getting bought out by AOL Time Warner???? … story here… http://www.gothamtechminute.blogspot.com
In the other news, Nokia Labs released the LBS enabled Chat application.
http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/chat
how do you miss a scoop when it is about you. dA
At their “Peril” … ?
Come on. This reads like a headline from the NY Post!
Actually, the Post would have turned it into a funny pun or double entendre - this is just over the top!
My BlackBerry has had location awareness in Google Maps since last year. I fail to see what benefit there is to making a location-aware social network iPhone-only, unless it’s a social network for meeting annoying douchebags…
“Loopt has already had some problems with unintended invites going out (although this hasn’t happened to me and I’ve been using it since launch)” It did happen to you Mike, you spammed me :).
In other news, Techcrunch admitted to being completely pointless, or words to that effect!
Problem is as with most start-ups, they lack correct product management,business model and marketing. Carriers will always try and protect this via their “Walled Gardens”, charging a monthly fee. Why this ultimately fails to become the gorilla is because - Apps/Content just want to be free * Note how the multi-billion dollor MVNO/Ringtone business is constantly moving off-deck; http://www.tonethis.com Carriers loose because their models lock out all other carriers other then themselves (think the multi-year ongoing communication issue between Yahoo Messenger,MSN Messenger, AIM Messenger,etc) . Free + Cross Platform = Scale / Category Killer most quickly.
http:tallchat.com
how do you miss a scoop when it is about you. dA
http:tallchat.com
http://tallchat.com
Loopt’s awful. Please don’t promote this SMS spam tool. It spammed all my contacts. I uninstalled that crap immediately after I found out. Never again!!!
I hope Facebook and Myspace add location soon so people don’t have to use garbage like Loopt.
Err you sure aren’t using the same version of Loopt that I am…
>> notify other users when they are physically close to them,
Nope.
>> show a picture, first or full name, and basic profile information.
Nope.
>> If you’re both in the same bar or at the same conference, you can browse and filter other users to find a date or do a business deal.
Nope.
Using Loopt I can see the location of my (two) other friends and nobody else.
It’s might be interesting to know that I’m only four blocks from a buddy (assuming we both happen to have used Loopt around the same time) but that’s about it.
Nothing in Loopt allows me to discover new people based on my location any more than Facebook/Myspace does. (I.e. not at all).
If the Facebook application is “clearly better” as you state above, why is it rated at 2 stars on iTunes and the Myspace app is rated at 4 stars?
I think that you need to get out of the facebook lovefest and examine the apps for their real merit.
Or do you think that actual users have a different opinion than tech elite?
B
Facebook is a good application but it has many, many bugs! Too many in fact, I wonder why they even published it with so many things not working properly. The web app is clearly better, for now, with more features and less bugs, which explains why people give such a low grade to FB on the app store.
The problem for both MySpace and Facebook is that they were never built to be mobile and location based. Sure, they can add the “buddy tracking” feature quite easily in a technical perspective, but there are for sure more sophisticated location aware features that adds value — such as location news feeds that aggregates user generated content within a given physical area. The feeds are dynamically changing as you update your location. We at ZKOUT built the whole platform with location in its genes together with a heavy focus on mobile. We actually built the features for mobile first and developed a retrofit for the desktop post that — opposite of what the traditional social players have done.
Jeff - I invited you and about 20 other people, that’s not spam.
Michael: So you have a profile on myspace (and loopt) but not facebook?
Oh, nevermind… easy to find..
Facebook says they are looking to add location aware services at a later date…http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=22389032130
i love oyu.
Currently heavy research is being done on LBS privacy (for example IETF’s GEOPRIV initiative with PIDF-LO, a data format that carries with it flags about privacy levels and how long the data can be retained).
Spatial generalization (cloaking), zoning, obfuscation, FragDB-like systems are other hot research areas.
The bottom line is that there is a balance between the level of location privacy and the level of services an individual may wish to receive.
I believe the features you mention above, such as finding out if a friend is nearby, will be commoditized very rapidly. In the end, the services that will be widely adopted will be the ones that provide real value to the users in addition to these commodity features. At http://unype.com, we are building a service where you can interact with people around you in real-time, you can do geo-publishing and you can access sales, discounts, news, events and any other location-based data easily through one interface, while having zero-friction to use the service through our integration with all major social networks.
A while ago Loopt announced a deal with CBS Mobile to transmit LB advertisements to Sprint/Nextel and Boost Mobile cellphones.
Many Blackberry smartphones have had a TRUE GPS receiver for several years. A Blackberry with GPS is nothing new, and SOME carriers actually even let you use it (i.e. Sprint/Nextel doesn’t restrict it at all on their Blackberry devices). That other carriers DO restrict (citing baseless “customer privacy and security concerns”) the hardware that is IN THE DEVICE and SHOULD BE FREE to use really ought to get more attention. It comes up every couple months but interest seems to die out quickly, I guess because no Blackberry is a “cool” as an iPhone and no Blackberry gets as much fawning from the media as does the iPhone.
I just registered peoplenear.me half thinking the registration wasn’t going to go through, but it did. Not really sure what I’m going to do with it but the idea is cool.
Facebook, Lacks behind myspace on the iPhone Application, as far as I’m concerned. Facebook, lacks the ability to see your friend requests on the application. Myspace needs improvements to the photo area. the photo album view only allows you to view 30 photos.