Loopt Jumps Ahead Of Facebook And MySpace On iPhone. Told You.

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).

Our version of Loopt is here.