Using maps to communicate a position is gaining a lot of popularity in the social networking sphere. The iPhone offers over 1,900 location-based apps in its store. Tech entrepreneurs are seeing gold in this river. It’s not just a startup thing: Google launched Latitude, a location-aware social network.
This is only the beginning of new lifestyles. Twitter created a new form of networking by asking one simple question: What are you doing? In the location-aware space, there is one app that follows the same philosophy and asks: Where are you ?
Launching public today for the Where 2.0 Conference, Glympse is the first application that lets you share your location with whoever you want during a limited amount of time. You use Glympse when you want to let others know where you are.
Glympse is dead-simple: once you installed the app, launch it, let it find you on a map, set a timer, choose a contact, and press send. For the amount of time you have set, the person(s) you have chosen will be able to see you on a map in real-time. It is called ‘sending a Glympse to someone’.
Example 1: You leave the office. Instead of calling home to let the family know you are on your way, send them a glympse.
Example 2: You are meeting a business partner at a Starbucks downtown. Set a Glympse on one hour and send it to him. It will make it a lot easier to find each others.
I have tested the app with Bryan Trussel, the Founder and CEO of Glympse. We met in the San Francisco’s SOMA for the video interview below, and thanks to Glympse, I didn’t have to show up 15 minutes in advance “just in case”: I was at Starbucks having a Frappuccino, enjoying the sun, and keeping an eye on my guest’s nearing.
Technically, sending a Glympse to someone is creating a unique glympse url with your route in real-time on it. Virtually, anyone who has this url can view you in real-time. In terms of privacy, that’s the only issue I can identify. The fact that Glympse is meant to run in the background is also an issue for some phones. Otherwise, the simplicity of the concept has a lot of merit, and I know I will be playing around with it pretty often.