Facebook and MySpace have great mobile apps. At least, they’re great if you’re satisfied with a subset of the features you get on their normal websites. But they don’t yet take advantage of location/presence features on the iPhone and other platforms. We said this summer that they ignore location at their peril, and we still believe it.
Loopt, one of a handful of location-aware iPhone social networks (and the one we are partnered with), is currently (meaning over the recent period, undefined by Apple) the 20th most popular free iPhone application, and is being downloaded more often than both Facebook and MySpace. Facebook is no. 25, and MySpace is no. 43. This is despite the fact that MySpace and Facebook heavily promote their iPhone apps to their 100 million plus users. Loopt doesn’t have that deep base of existing users to market to. All time, Loopt is the fourth most popular iPhone social networks after Facebook, MySpace and AIM.
But they do have Apple’s support. Last week Apple ran a Loopt iPhone television ad, which is shown above. That resulted in a big part of the surge in downloads, Loopt says.
Loopt won’t say how many iPhone downloads they have, but a source says they have tens of thousands of daily downloads across all their mobile platforms (including iPhone, RIM and other platforms).
Technically they only surpassed them in current daily downloads. You see a similar jump up in daily ranking with shazam after their commercial.
Mike:
Looks like you’re in a panic. Loopt not doing well, and you write as though they are.
Very, eh, Soviet of you.
1. Shilling TWICE for struggling company in the same day: $85 dollars.
2. Loopt and TC Getting SUED for patent infringement by Earthcomber: PRICELESS
Pretty awesome though that they are movin on up.
It must be fun to know that 1.3M readers will hear your gloating.
I prefer Brightkite. It has a much better interface.
I dunno zingersteve, I downloaded all of the social networking apps including brightkite and I think Loopt is the best one out there. Every feature feels very well done, and the map is silky smooth–I can easily scroll to a family member and some friends that I share my location with. Brightkite feels like random clutter..
Mr. Kelsey slipped up when lying about downloading all the social apps.
How do we know this?
1. Ever meet Mr. Kelsey in person. I’m not saying the guy is a child molester, I’m saying a lot of child molester’s I know say the guy really creeps them out.
2. He went to prom with my mother. It was weird.
Frankly Loopt is a pretty lame app that’s overpromoted. I mean just look at the AppStore reviews – three star average is hardly something to shout about.
It’s an interesting concept but it’s location features are HIGHLY dependent on people using it regularly – the lack of background updating makes it worthless unless you and your friends turn it on every few minutes.
In addition appplications and services will live or die based on their relevance to consumers – and relevance for a social networking app means how many of my friends are/can/will sign up. Loopt has too many barriers to succeed. Friends -> Friends who have iPhones -> Friends who will try Loopt -> Friends who will continue to use it often enough to be relevant.
Sorry Loopt, in years to come someone is going to nail this functionality but it’s unlikely to be you.
Dunno why you’re such a hater, but you’re already wrong on your claims. Loopt isn’t iPhone only and they do offer background location updates. I actually have friends who use Loopt on their Motorola RAZR on verizon and sprint fusic. Their locations update in the background.
Funnily enough I’d love if Loopt was everything the hype makes it to be, but it’s unfortunately not. And yes, if you have the GPS Razr Loopt can update in the background – I know zero people who have that phone.
I think two strategic errors from Loopt are requiring phone numbers (that alone gave me pause) and creating another service instead of piggybacking on something like Twitter. I like Twinkle’s approach – they are a Twitter frontend with the interesting location information being retained on their own servers.
Andrew are you blowing Sam altmer? lying butthead
Paul Graham here to apologize to everyone involved with this PR abortion better known as Loopt.
Or as we here at Ycombinator call it: The Emporer’s New Clothes.
Let’s face it, this Ycombinator seed money thing has gotten out of hand. I first did it to meet runaway cheerleaders, chicks who like malt liquor, and girls with serious Daddy issues.
I never thought anyone outside of Boston would have ever considered this to be real. Altman wanted $15k, and I’ll be damned if we didn’t give it to him.
My bad.
I actually agree that Loopt is still very rough around the edges, and the interface feels more like an engineer did it than a real user. But it’s a good start.
I love Loopt, too bad none of my friends do.
I’m confused…why is it suprising that there is a massive jump in Loopt’s numbers after having a nationwide commercial with their product placed directly in an iPhone add? Seems to me it would only be news if the opposite were true…
I love loopt, but too bad i don’t have any friends
You mean all that money you wasted on an iPhone didnt make you popular enough to make new friends? Apple has failed you!
I know! WTF! False advertisement! Apple promised to make me look cool and hip so i can make some cool and hip friends. WTF.
Well, loopt also run on many different carriers including Sprint, Verizon, Blackberries and MetroPCS. I do have friends running loopt on blackberry which is very different from other social service.
I’ve been using Loopt for over a year now. I started on a crappy Sprint phone but switched over to an iPhone 3G four months ago. It’s awesome. I travel a lot for work so it’s fun to be able to let my friends know where I am (now use it with 8 close friends).
What’s cool about Loopt is that it isn’t JUST an iPhone app. People sort of forget that they support a ton of devices so I actually can (and do) use it with friends on Verizon, Sprint, BBs, etc. Loopt’s investment in relationships with a bunch of carriers is really going to set them apart in this space. The user experience is definitely best on the iPhone, but not too shabby on “lesser” devices.
Anyway, consider me a satisfied user. Let’s see what they come up with next!
>they ignore location at their peril, and we still believe it
I don’t know if it is just me, but I really don’t like these “know my location” mobile services. I have used Fb mobile, I think it is one of the best mobile apps out there. And if it had geo-locator services I for sure would NOT use it. Its bad enough sites (and my network) know almost everything about me. I draw the line when it comes to where I am physically 24/7
yeah, ok, but what about when you’re at a party and want to know things about the people around you? Maybe there are times when you would be willing to share location info in order to get good info back on those around you.
stalker
yeah, what!?… good info on the people around you??
The app hardly lets you give any info other than a couple one liners. You are telling me that while at a party, everyone there is going to be on their cell phone, with loopt on, AND have the loopt mix feature on? Give me a break….
This app is a fun way to have a geo location news feed for a close group of friends to screw around with, thats pretty much it. Once services like facebook, myspace, twitter all give you the option to have their mobile apps be geo aware, i don’t see much use for loopt.
Geo-aware is such a SF thing. People in bumfuck, egypt, don’t care about this kind of lameness. I would much rather call or text to find out where people are rather than track them down like I’m predator.
werd
I’m hoping that Loopt becomes available in Canada sooner or later. It was one of the apps I was really looking forward to when I got my iPhone. But alas, no love for those of us north of the 49.
Loopt’s interface seems in general fine to me. The map is zoomable and draggable like you’d expect. As I recall you couldn’t do that in the v1.0 of Pelago’s Whrrl.
Loopt does seem to have a few bugs though. For instance it always shows Michael Arrington’s location as “Here”. Here being the eastside of the Seattle area. I don’t think you are in fact here, but it is freaking me out. It also shows that Arrington last logged in on 12/19/63.
when a bs app like loopt dominates you know something is wrong with society. i have friends but i could careless what they are doing.
I would really like to see some of the geo apps such as this go cross platform over to Android ASAP.
if they have over ten thousand downloads daily, that 4M new users a year.
at $3 a month that amounts to $144M/year gross. at that rate they should be eminently profitable…..am i missing something?
I like the application but I don’t have iphone. So, I’ll prefer an application which can work on any mobile phone. I’m really happy with a web application at http://fonet.mobi which has a nice ans simple interface for social networking besides many other features. If you not using it, its worth take a look at it.
@Andy V
Check out the Loopt blog!
http://www.loop...-mobile-g1.html
Min, on behalf of Loopt
Min was fired from her last job – nice try min, you will never be max, idiot
I love it when Arrington quasi-gloats about something he quasi-got-right. Yay! Some free downloadable got downloaded more than some other free downloadable, which is a fair comparison since the other free downloadables also have WAP offerings anyway… nice job on that call.
Call me when someone starts making money.
Very few people are interested in sharing their location: they are either fearful of privacy and/or don’t see the point. The (very) few of my friends that I have encouraged to install Loopt have used it excitedly for a few weeks and then stop updating.
Bear in mind I live and work in Silicon Valley (Mtn View no less) and if I can’t get my friends into Loopt, I can’t see the public at large going for it.
Location services are cool but pretty useless and the wow factor wears off *very* quickly. I used to work for Airflash/Webraska back in 2000-2003 and we had the same problem then (we also had the added barrier of inflexible carriers). Attitudes have not changed that much in 8 years.
Very few people are interested in sharing their location: they are either fearful of privacy and/or don’t see the point. The (very) few of my friends that I have encouraged to install Loopt have used it excitedly for a few weeks and then stop updating.
Bear in mind I live and work in Silicon Valley (Mtn View no less) and if I can’t get my friends into Loopt, I can’t see the public at large going for it.
Location services are cool but pretty useless and the wow factor wears off *very* quickly. I used to work for Airflash/Webraska back in 2000-2003 and we had the same problem then (we also had the added barrier of inflexible carriers). Attitudes have not changed that much in 8 years.
Downloads metrics are misleading. Most apps in this category are not actively used. The geo-aware app fun factor wears off rather quickly for ONE reason:
Apple’s iPhone apps cannot run in the background! You have to manually launch all the apps and manually make updates… one app at a time.
90% of all the social iPhone apps, especially the geo-aware social apps, are USELESS until the iPhone can run them in the background & let the user multitask.
Imagine an iPhone alerting you when your geo-aware social network buddies are in your area w/o you having to log in to check anything — NOW THAT’S A REAL APP (privacy & battery issues aside).
This is not Loopt’s fault of course but things could be so much more interesting if the iPhone supported multitasking & background apps out of the box. The way things are right now, you can’t even listen to your own music while running the apps — what a mess.
Now RIM’s BlackBerries & Loopt that’s another story…
Wake me when they get gps running in the background. Until then loopt is just plain loopy. It is a total yawn fest.
looks like loopt is not available to australian customers
Let me get this straight: This blog has a business relationship with Loopt, which has been warned by its own VC (along with other startups) to perform or die, it finds someone to try to sell it…
…and this is NEWSWORTHY?
Aside from M.A.’s obvious financial interest in Loopt’s success, why should the readers care? This reads more like an internal rah rah Email to keep up morale than anything else.
WOW!
I believe Brightkite is much better than Loopt however ….
All Facebook needs to do is add Location identification into is existing application and like Steve Jobs says “BAM” + “BOOM” … Loopt, Brightkite etc, are obsolete and out of business. Why not share your location with the friends you already have on the most active social network ….
Finally …. Loopt may have the most downloads – but how many removals! It would be interesting to see how many people DELETED application and the actual amount of time a user has it on their phone before they DELETED it.
Told you? They got their own iPhone commercial! How is Shazam doing?
I think Loopt and many other location based iPhone social apps have a ways to go.
That being said, the inference in this post that Loopt is suddenly out performing Facebook and MySpace apps is laughable. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the Facebook app has dominated the free apps list since the iPhone was released. At some point that app is bound to reach a certain saturation point.
I don’t blame you for trying to push it though, even though you admit it’s still “rough around the edges”. You stand to personally benefit from its success.
I love Loopt, too bad none of my friends do.
I’d love to check it out and see what the fuss is about, but no dice – its not available in the UK. Any ideas when they’ll open it up to non US markets?
I think FB was trying to focus on growing their translation services before growing their mobile product this past year
Agreed that Brightkite is a better implementation. Loopt doesn’t seem to have a cohesive strategy for acquiring users. Running a TV ad is a waste of capital and highlights this problem. All the hype and smart money in the world will not save them if the user experience doesn’t live up to expectations.
It’s still a lonely place for Loopt users here in Manhattan.
Tsk tsk .. deleting thoughtful replies?