GITweekly

I used to be the King of Melbourne. I sat atop the leader-board casting elitist eyes across the masses. My kingdom was new, slowly burgeoning, yet eager to gather the masses to its bosom. To be honest it’s never really got past that point. Sad really.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Foursquare promised me excitement. It promised me multitudes of special deals just by checking in. The problem is that it turned into an unfullfilling, and sometimes petty, landgrab.

So it is with little regret that I say bon voyage, arrivederci, despedida, mwen kite nou, and adieu.

Sure I held many mayorships and I was glad to lead in an imaginary and metaphysical way. A sort of ghostette. A phantom nodding knowingly from afar.

I just wish there was more to keep me here. Entry into a draw to win a pillow just doesn’t tickle my….ooh I wonder if it’s allergy free?

So PlacePop.

Let’s throw it out there. PlacePop is “the” great new up-and-comer in the location based social networking app scene. If you can find it.

It sits, God knows where, in the social networking area of the App Store beneath the “breathtaking women” and “uncensored ring tones” apps that shouldn’t even be in this section. But if you do install this free app onto your iPhone you will not be disappointed.

It will obviously be compared to the big boys in this scene, the Foursquares and Gowallas, but I feel that it is so much more than that. It is “pure” in its intentions. Yeah, I know. That sounds a little pompous, but when you break it down, PlacePop is elegant in its simplicity.

Fire up the app and you get presented with a “Where are you now?” tab. As is the norm in this “scene”, these locations are based upon your GPS coordinates supplied by your phone. Select your location off the list or scroll down and search for it by name. Once you’ve checked in the magic starts to happen.

Your location’s social stream is displayed under the “What’s Up” pointer. This’ll show you relevant Twitter and Yelp feeds for that location as well as any details about your travels there. If your friends are there, or have left a note, you’ll hear about it too.

Just want to find out what’s going on in your own social circles? Hit the activity icon. It scrolls up a list of check-ins, notes, and images – as PlacePopp’d by you and your compadres. Simple and super social.

Admittedly you can earn “status” points and subsequently Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum status at locations you check-in at – ala Foursquare’s mayorships – but there is no competitive scoreboard – thank *insert deities name here*. This feature will be used to award keen ‘Popsters for their loyalty. Check in a a coffee shop 5 times and they might just give you that last piece of cheesecake. Nice. Businesses that are interested can head here to make some glorious offering.

So in a nutshell, PlacePop distills the good from the other players in their segment and produces a location based social networking application that is:

• Free – yay!
• Super simple to use.
• Easy to fit into your social scene.
• Hopefully going to give you some tangible freebies in the not too distant future – I like my cheesecake strawberry flavoured.
• Doesn’t force you into competing with people who go out 30 times a night.
• Orange – nice choice – colour psychologists would say that this would make it an energetic, exciting, enthusiastic and warm app – I reckon it just looks great.

So there you have it. PlacePop.

Do yourself a favour. Find it. Invite your social network. Give it a go – even if that means you’ll be laying off the Foursquare and Gowalla. The only problem is that you may not go back.

In our opinion – PlacePop is location based social networking without the gimmicks. Grabbitnow.

…

Stop Press…

We did manage to catch up with the super-dooper Julia Graham, Community Manager with PlacePop. We posed a few choice questions and she deemed us worthy of a reply.

Who do you see as the major competitors in “this space” – am I right in guessing Gowalla and Foursquare?

Although we are certainly all playing in the same space, right now we don’t feel direct competition from apps like Foursquare/Gowalla that are focused on a true game experience. We think that both these apps are great products which appeal to a certain type of user. Since the LBS space is growing so rapidly, we believe there will be a market for both location-based games and, as you said previously, “pure” location-based social networking apps like PlacePop.

What points of difference do you have over your opposition?

This answer is a quote from our CEO, Kent Lindstrom:

“In my experience, the first mover rarely ends up winning, because of the enormous burden of pioneering.  Lycos, Friendster and Powells.com were all eventualy exceeded by the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Our goal is to be a dead-simple app that reduces the experience to its essence, much like Facebook did compared to MySpace. Some specifics:

1. As you check in, you gain status, which is clearly defined (10 check-ins is silver status and so-forth). There is no mayor, point system, badges, founders, pins, etc. These are very fun elements, but complicated for many people.
2. You collect the places as you go – as you add places, you build a ‘placelist’, that you can access any time on your phone.
3. Photos – simple, but our users said they wanted to post photos of the places they went.”

When will you move to other platforms? e.g. Android, Blackberry, the newly open sourced Symbian…

We don’t have a specific timeline sketched out at this point since we are focused on creating an outstanding product for iPhone and the web, but later in 2010 you should start to see these releases.

Your reward system sounds great – how many businesses have you got offering discounts at the moment?

It’s early days for us, as we just launched the app in January. We are currently in talks with several venues and will be announcing some exciting deals and promotions very soon. We are also adding a new page to the PlacePop website where consumers can go to suggest deals they would like businesses to offer them, and we will take those suggestions to the businesses directly.

Where do you see this business heading in the next 6 months? e.g. World domination, erm… sold to Google like the Aardvarks of the world…

Again, a few words from Kent:

1. “Short term we want to use the early adoption of our app to continually make it simpler, and more powerful.
2. Long term, we would like to become the ubiquitous application for connecting through the places we go, and for getting rewarded for loyalty at places”

And the future…

The next release will include:

• Ability to cross-post notes, photos and check-ins to Facebook and Twitter.
• Improved ways to connect with friends (a “see who’s on” feature, better ways to invite friends, etc.).
• New & improved welcome screen to help users get started
• Plus more…

Cant wait.

As good as the big fruit company’s App Store is, it really struggles to let the cream rise to the top. Companies with famous angel investors and some serious cash for marketing soon find themselves in the top 100, but those without the proverbial silver spoon often take the proverbial silver medal.

Another problem faced by iPhone applications are that they have to rise above the “opportunistic” apps in their area of expertise. A quick glance at the “Social Networking” area of iTunes would have you expecting to see instant messaging apps, location based social networking (LBSN) apps, possibly some blogging software? In other words, apps to network socially. Nup. A lot of these apps are obscured by “Truth or Dare”, “Gross Jokes”, and “Pickup line” apps.

It’s a farce. A system too bloated by rubbish in the wrong places. I’d really love it if the pome-ish company would put a “gimmick app” section into their store and get things ordered properly. People spend a lot of time and money creating useful apps, only to be lost in the abyss of apps you’d use once.

Anyhoo, as with the most of the smartphone community, we’ve all become a little obsessed with location aware social applications. Despite being pushed down the list by the gimmick apps, Foursquare and Gowalla are two popular sources of location based goodness.

Foursquare comes in at number 24 in the Oz store and allows its users to “check-in” at places. Each check in scores you points and you also get rewarded with badges for certain achievements like going out four nights in a row. The more check-ins at a place could promote you to becoming the “Mayor” of that place. If becoming the “Mayor” of your local MickeyDees is important to you then this could be your app.  The problem with this offering is that the leader-board is a farce. The people on top of the board would have to be heading to 30 places a night to get the points they have. To put it in perspective, when I was the leader in Melbourne, last year, I needed 43 points. Today you’d need 1214, yeah right Mr Daragh K. It really isn’t too engaging. But you can head on over here to have a read of what we thought of Foursquare last year (its a little more positive than I’ve been here – must be the hot weather).

Gowalla is the second major player in this segment.  Like Foursquare you do the check-in thing to “stamp” your “passport”. Its greatest feature, although not being utilised well in Australia, is the trip feature. After checking into some interesting places in an area you can add these to a “trip” for others to follow. This elevates it above Foursquare but, as with Foursquare, it just feels like a bit of a game. It also has a virtual item drop component, ala geocaching but I’m thinking that may just be for the little folk among us.

Now that our spleen’s been vented we can talk about what we err… came here to talk about. Great apps that just aren’t prominent due to the obscurity caused by debris in the App Store. PlacePop is one such app. We’ll try and bring you our views on this app in the next day or so because I think we’ve made you read enough today.

Oh yeah, Foursquare/Gowalla are still fun – “let’s stay positive people”.

In this day and age it’s too easy to feel overwhelmed by life, the universe and everything. We’re all time poor and super stressed, just wishing to shut-down and rest when we’ve got down-time. Or you just might be a lazy slob who can’t be stuffed. Whatever, I really don’t care in the nicest way possible.

But hang-on a minute, is that an iPhone in your sweaty sausage-like fingers?

Here is a brand new (for Melbourne) way of getting off your behind and exploring our great town..

Foursquare is a social networking, location based, smartphone and web-based game of sorts that runs on iPhones, Android phones and the venerable Blackberry. The nutshell version is that you run the app and, by using the inbuilt GPS and 3G connection, get a list of nearby funky places. These could be pubs, clubs, cafes and the like. The idea is that you go to the venue and “checkin”. You then score points for said “checkin”. Easy as pie. I can see you getting up of that Futon already.

How many points do you get? Well, for the first visit to a venue you score yourself 5 points. You get bonus points for stopping at other places during the night out (weekdays 4pm to 8am and anytime on the weekend) and, to promote cirrhosis, you receive extra bonuses for going out more than one night in a row.

What about during the day? Yes, you can still score the “first visit” 5 pointer and points for visiting places anytime on the weekend. Sweet.

Why would I want to do this? Well there are other cool features and apparently more to come. You’ll:

• know where your friends are on your nights out. You can even give them a “shout” to tell them to head on over.
• find out which places are pumping – click on the place and see who’s there.
• find out what’s done at each place – click on tips and find out that they have a huge beer menu.
• get maps to places.
• earn badges based upon how prolific you are or how adventurous.
• become the Mayor of a venue by checking in there the most times.
• see if you’re the king of your whole town by looking at the Leaderboard- your stats are the red ones. And yes I am the king of Melbourne (for now – until the weekend/people start using foursquare).

King of Melbourne

So what will the future hold for Foursquare?

Location based technologies are taking off in a huge way thanks to the accessibility of GPS enabled smartphones. In the States, where Foursquare began, it is huge. People vie night after night to be mayor of any place. But what about other aspects of this technology? By my reckoning you could soon expect (probably from Foursquare – thanks to their huge userbase):

• Location based advertising – walk past a McChucks and your phone may vibrate with the message “buy a burger – you look hungry”
• Location based discounts – this I would like. Visit Brunswick street and as you walk past Polyester Records you get sent a flyer that gives you 20% of anything in store if you walk in within 20 minutes – sweet.
• Instant friend notifications – if a friend is nearby your phone will buzz and let you know – privacy be gone!
• Plus lots more – I have too many ideas!

Lastly a word of warning.

While the website lets you set levels of privacy you should always be careful about who your friends are. I could easily see some bloke befriending you only to find out when you’re away from your jewelry at home.

Be warned – play nice.