We’ve all been there. You’re late for a meeting with friends, stuck in traffic and unsure of when you’re actually going to arrive. You call them with updates like “well, I’m closer now, but still not sure…” and a shaky “maybe I’ll be there in 20 minutes?” What if your friends could track exactly where you were without the frustrating back and forth? Glympse, a new location-based service that is decidedly not another social network, is looking to help you do just that. Glympse is launching tonight on Android, and is coming soon to the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and “other leading smartphone devices” (read: Palm).
Now, Glympse isn’t the first application that allows you to share your location with friends. But while other services like Loopt ask you to create a permanent connection with your peers, Glympse recognizes that oftentimes we don’t want all of our contacts to know our current whereabouts. Sure, you could adjust privacy settings on a per-user basis to specify who to share your location with and when, but that’s a hassle and can be easy to forget about. So Glympse takes a different approach, instead asking you to create temporary connections with other people that last for a maximum of four hours. The service doesn’t have any concept of long-time friends – you establish a connection, and it’s gone four hours (or less) later.
Glympse is the kind of application that sounds a little pointless at first, but the more you think about it, the more you realize how great the service could be. I can’t remember how many times I’ve told a friend or colleague I’d meet them at a restaurant “in about an hour”, only to find that I get stuck in traffic and wind up calling them multiple times to tell them when I’ll actually show up. With Glympse, I could just send them a message when I left, and they’d be able to track my progress. I wouldn’t have to be overly selective about who I shared my data with, as their permission would expire only a few hours later.
Reestablishing connections with your peers could get old quick, so Glympse is making it as painless as possible (you can initiate a Glympse in well under a minute). After opening the application, Glympse will ask you who you’d like to share your current location with (you can either enter their phone number or Email address manually, or you can select from your contacts). Then you specify the duration, which determines how long this contact will be able to see your current location. You can optionally also enter a message to accompany your location, as well as a plot for your ultimate destination (I could send a map to a friend with a marker that says “meet me here”). Hit Send and you’re done – a message will be sent to your contact informing them of your current position.
The message itself will contain to a link unique Glympse website, which pinpoints the sender’s current location on a dynamically updating map. You can view the website from mobile phones, and you can also share it with friends. This opens the door to some minor privacy issues (I could potentially Tweet a Glympse link and let the world see my friend’s current location) but since it would expire in a few hours anyway it probably wouldn’t be a big deal. Glympse isn’t launching with notifications (you’ll have to manually track your friend’s current status on the map), but the company says that it will soon issue an update that adds the feature soon. This means that you’ll be able to receieve a text message or Email whenever your friend arrives within a certain radius of you. Very cool.
This all sounds great, but there’s one major obstacle that’s going to hold Glympse back, and that’s the lack of background updating on the iPhone. Glympse is really only useful when your peers can keep track of your current position – not where you were the last time you remembered to check in (similar problems affect many other LBS services like Loopt). If I wanted to use my iPhone in the examples above, I’d have to leave the application open for my entire drive. Android does support background updating, but this can be a battery drain and the Android Marketplace doesn’t have nearly the momentum of the App Store. In any case, Apple is rumored to be trying to bring background updates to the iPhone, and other platforms like the upcoming Palm Pre support them, so this weakness may wind up being shortlived after all.
This rules, but the dishonest folk that thrive on infidelity and lying are bound to boycott this.
It sounds great, but when I think about it, it wouldn’t help me because I get 800 minutes of free local talk time, which means I am better off calling my friends every now and then with my whereabouts..
This is one of those things you need to see demonstrated. Very cool and very well thought out. Much better than Google Latitude, which made a ton of bad assumptions.
I completely agree. There have been many times when I wanted to share my location from my BlackBerry easily…and as “easy” it already is on the BB, I don’t think its easy enough…
I wanna try this one out and see how it is, now I just need to get a 3G phone so its faster.
Your friend could track where you are: that is what Glympse is for basically. So what? Does it help you to get something done? For example, getting you the hell out of a traffic jam. This software is good for your teenage daughters or your wife if you want to track them, that is.
This rocks. I have a video coming soon to http://scobleizer.blip.tv that demonstrates how it works (probably at about 10 p.m.)
This is MUCH better than Google Latitude, which made a TON of bad assumptions.
this is brilliant in 50 ways off the top of the head, and 500 more certainly
Interesting application of geolocation. I like the ability to set the time period and who can see.
And the speed can be tracked! Parents can use to track their teens -where they are and how fast they are driving.
There were at least 10 Android applications that let your friends get your location by
email,
im,
web interface
since Android launched last year.
Loopt is not even on the radar in Android userland.
BTW, if you haven’t booked your Google IO hotel yet, you can get a $40 off coupon code on retailmenot.com for a 3 night stay.
I got a downtown hotel for 3 nights about 5 minutes ago on orbitz for $154 w/tax.
I was even going to fly to SFO when I saw how cheap the Virgin flights were until I saw how much public transportation costs there. I think I will just get an oil change for my 2004 beater instead and pray I make it.
It costs $0.25 to ride the bus in Bellflower, it’s about $1 in Culver City. BART sucks. I took bart last year, it sucked and it’s overpriced. It reminded me of Canada.
i will use this frequently. traffic in the metro-DC area is the pits. no more dreaded calls to my patient wife, letting her know i am stuck in traffic. FTW.
Just for fun, we popped Glympse into a news story about Seattle residents tracking the whereabouts of a roaming bear:
http://www.news...e-bear-seattle/
This is a techcrunch FB Connect test
An interesting iphone app build on a similar premise, share location with friend you know for a specific amount of time is SosMe , http://www.sosme.com .
They also allow geo positionned emergency voice messaging.
There is a tipo, SosMe info site is at http://www.sosme.net/
Why bother my friends with my current location ? who carres !I can call them or text them, and it’s cheaper !
Maybe for CIA, FBI its brilliant idea, but for me personaly it’s pointless.
After all how many times you will use it ? And it hasn’t have any additional value
I’ll use it a lot, I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages for help in simple every day situations.
For example, if I’m at home cooking the family meal I may want to know what time my wife is due home so that I’m pulling the roast out of the oven the moment she walks through the door – this will help with that.
I have a WinMob phone and my wife has a Blackberry so I’m looking forward to this launching on both platforms.
-Jamie
Big brother is here and hes showed himself,of course if you own any mobile you’ll surely know that there are ways you can be secretly tracked.
Is that someone Knocking at the door?
yes, a gangsta rap
This sounds like a great idea. If you are driving to get to meet someone and arent really sure of your way, the last thing you want to do is worry about updating your friends at every red light. Instead set up the access through the app and bingo. Love it. Whens it out on the blackberry?
Wondering if 4 hours is long enough for us to know if we want my friends or whoever to know where I am.
Nevertheless its a very neat app and hope to try it sometime IN NEAR FUTURE
Berg would have loved this on camping trips. He would have known exactly when to put the dutch oven on the fire.
If you like this product (and I do), I think you will also like Snikkr (snikkr.com), a BlackBerry app that does all this and quite a bit more. Like Glympse, Snikkr treats temporary location sharing as a first-class user requirement. Unlike Glympse, however, we have a full suite of mapping, local-search and social networking features, that (hard to believe I know), is still easy and fun to use.
We’ve made 50 alpha slots available with the reg code “tc1″ (that’s a number 1) for readers of TechCrunch (and this post in particular). You will need a BlackBerry Curve, Pearl, Bold or Storm to use the alpha version of Snikkr.
Enjoy.
I noticed the screenshot had a “Arrives in …” entry to say how long before the user will reach his destination. Does the app actually calculate how long it would take to reach the destination, taking into account even traffic jams along the way?
Other than that, I think it’s an interesting app, but hopefully one that will not drain the battery of our devices just to use it.
Robert, absolutely correct. I’ve been using the beta (iphone) and an article doesn’t do it justice. I’m looking forward to your video. (disclaimer–I’m good friends with founder and CEO of Glympse)
Ryan: my video is now up at http://scobleizer.blip.tv