Fresh out of Nokia Beta Labs comes Friend View, an experimental location and micro-blogging service which works both on mobile phones as well as on the web.
To show your location, the Friend View application is using the built-in GPS or the network if there is no signal available (you can also set your location manually). When you turn on Friend View, it locates you as an avatar on a map and shows you all your friends as well. Whenever you send a micro-message, it appears as a word balloon on the map, and you can get a quick overview of what’s going on with your friends with the ‘What’s Up’ feature.
Stefan Constantinescu from Nokia Corporate Strategy shares more about the new feature, which is currently in development:
Our friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed:
I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it’s not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it’s not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one’s battery in no time …the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive.
AllAboutSymbian also wrote up a review and has more screenshots.
At first, we thought this had something to do with Nokia’s acquisition of location-based service Plazes earlier this year, but peculiarly the Plazes team released a mobile version of their own just yesterday which looks like an entirely different thing than Friend View.
Maybe the two teams should talk to one another. I hear Nokia has this new app in development called Friend View that lets you keep up with what your friends are doing.
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Awesome.. i was just waiting for a service like that one! Let me blog about it now
Sounds like a cool idea. Will this work on the iphone?
Everyone is being tracked these days….
LOL
It isn’t the same as twitxr??
Go to time stamp 0:21, where he says, “…Allows you to share what, how and who you are doing with your friends.”
WTF? It tells WHO I am DOING???
Robin, thanks for spreading the word!!
To clarify, Nokia Friend View is a research experiment, not something being deployed to the mass market, nor something built to last (as such). It partly overlaps with mainstream Nokia solutions like Nokia Maps, Nokia Chat, and some other stuff in our publishing pipeline. We had a long internal discussion about whether or not to launch Friend View publicly, due to potential market confusion. In the end, we decided to just go for it - in order to learn with our user community - and try to minimize the confusion with clear communications.
Hope this clarified our intentions… Anyhow, glad to see that you found this app worth attention!!
Take care,
Tommi Vilkamo
Manager of Nokia Beta Labs
Nokia… market confusion? That’s an understatement. Nokia is the definition of market confusion. There are so many “projects”, “research experiments”, websites, technologies hanging around Nokia, many aren’t updated regularly (even the supposedly active ones like Mosh), are not supported, and are frankly, pretty crappy. I won’t even mention the hundreds of different phone models.
The other big problem with Nokia is they build something and don’t finish or polish it. So then there is an (official) free crappy Nokia product and other companies won’t bother to build something to compete in that space because they can’t predict what Nokia is going to do (potentially put them out of business.) Take for example the Nokia Podcast app. It’s a pretty good app but it’s missing a few features that would make it truly usable (like remembering the point in a podcast where you stopped listening the last time.) So that’s the end of it… no one is going to bother to build another podcast app and Nokia will never fix theirs.
Yet another problem with Nokia is their reliance on the phone companies to do their sales and marketing for them. No wonder there is customer confusion regarding Nokia products.
Unless they get their act together quickly, Nokia will completely lose the (smart)phone war. They may end up a commodity phone maker but I can’t see them able to compete in that space for long.
Lauren’s Mom - the podcast app does remember where you stopped playing last. That has been integrated into S60 3.2 phones, and might have been backported into the lastest S60 3.1 firmware releases. Just keep adding your comments, someone will listen!
I have an e71 running s60 3.2 with podcast app version 1.10.1 and it doesn’t have that feature. I went to http://www.nokia.com/podcasting and the version there for download is Nokia_Podcasting_1.00.3.SIS which sounds like an older version. (Another example of a Nokia website being out of date?) On the iPhone when there is a new version of an app, it tells me and lets me install it with one click. On the Nokia I somehow have to know there is a new version and then track down the proper version. I can’t find a later version than 1.10.1 on the Nokia sites… What version is supposed to have this feature?
If only you knew a little about Nokia’s corporate organisation, you’d soon recognise the underlying reasons for this. Nokia is the definition of organisational confusion - no wonder market confusion follows.
That said, I think this is a glimpse of the future and once this kind of application is tweaked and polished, it’s going to become commonplace on all mobile phones.
why does nt my blog comes under the responses ?
@TOM ROFL
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
This wont work for smaller cities or towns. {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/IBpnnjAxhh_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”This wont work for smaller cities or towns. ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/76f9UZiB6p”}}}
With Nokia as the smart phone leader, and also having the power to move this app onto every deck they manufacture, will this become an immediate threat to mobile social networks like Loopt and ever-growing Twitter? It certainly will look like it is on paper at first. Now we have to wait and wee the kind of usage it gets.
I’ve been playing around with it for a while and i like it. Ville was too harsh on it
Even though I have the E71, which has amazing battery life, I’d still rather not have one more program sucking juice from the device. Even Nokia’s new push-based email service seems to noticeably drain my battery more than I’d like. I’m all for location-based networking, but less power intensive means of positioning must be developed first.
RIP Loopt!
Nice but where does Friend View fit in the context of Nokia viNe?
http://www.nseries.com/madebyhand
I’ll prefer a web application which can work on any mobile phone. I’m already using the mobile web site http://fonet.mobi which has lots of features besides social networking, blogging etc.