[Article updated to reflect regional availability of application.]
The (very) short list: Booyah, Facebook Places, Foursquare, Google Latitutude, Gowalla, Loopt, and Twitter geo-location. Oh, and now Geomium.
Available in the UK, US, and continental Europe, Geomium is the latest startup company to try its hand at building a location-based social network, a model with dozens of innovators and probably even more imitators.
But Geomium thinks it’s bringing something new to the table.
Drawing data from Yelp, Qype (basically a Yelp just for London), and Eventful (an online event finder), the new location service has the advantage of launching with an established collection of useful features. Often the hardest part of starting one of these services is accruing the necessary base of initial users.
As in many social location apps, Geomium users can see where their friends are and chat with them, meet new people, and discover nearby bars, restaurants, or events.
Geomium is currently only available for iPhone, but the app is coming soon to Android, Blackberry, Nokia, and other smartphones. The strict London launch will be followed by launch in other UK cities by early 2011. European and United States launches come after that.
Some forecasted that Facebook’s entry into the market, with Places, would shatter all the hopes of any fledgling startups and greatly inhibit further growth of even the most established services, like Foursquare.
Geomium CEO Michael Ferguson doesn’t seem to think so:
The future is very bright for new entrants into the market that can deliver a strong and useful location-based services (LBS) proposition that will help make the everyday lives of people better. It will be much easier to create a new community based around the full potential of LBS rather than try to convert an existing community, who signed up to a service for a different product.
His last point seems to be a jab at Facebook for trying to add a layer of location to its social network, an attack that might not be entirely fair. If people originally signed up for Facebook to connect with friends online, then one can easily imagine shared location being a part of that experience.
At the same time, what with the issue of privacy concerns constantly lobbed against Facebook, Ferguson could have a point. The best location-based service might be the one wholly dedicated to that concept and built from the ground up towards that end.
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Loopt is a Silicon Valley based startup that has built a revolutionary social mapping service to change the way people use mobile phones to keep in touch with their friends. Loopt facilitates real-world interaction between friends and puts an end to frustrating missed connections.
Using location-based technologies, Loopt lets you know where your friends are by automatically updating maps on your mobile handset. Loopt even lets you send messages to nearby friends or receive automatic alerts when they're nearby so that you never miss an opportunity to meet. Loopt also lets you journal your life so that your friends can see what you're up to. With Loopt, mobile subscribers put themselves on the map.
Loopt is backed by venture capital firms Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates, the same firms that helped found Google, Yahoo!, PayPal and TiVo among many other technology innovators.
Loopt is available on Boost Mobile and Sprint Nextel and will be available on other major US carriers soon
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
