I'm surprised that the author didn't censor the faces of the Loopt users or at least the person who messaged him. People opt-in to the service but do they give away all their rights to privacy? Do people who opt-in agree not to publish the photos of other users?
If you push a piece of information into the public sphere, it's public information. The only way it would be private is if they made every Loopt user sign an NDA, or something similar, about never disclosing anything they see while using the service.
You should have a full expectation of nothing but the highest level of privacy when you are on a service that GPS tracks you wherever you go and allows you to publicly view everyone in a given radius. Not only that, but you should also expect these strangers to be absolutely discreet when you proceed to brashly proposition your entire radius for sex.
Let's also take this online example to a similar public gathering in a small radius -- a party, where you proceed to ask roughly half the people at the party to hook-up later that night. You would definitely expect every individual to maintain the highest level of confidentiality in that scenario.
Disagree. You might hope that those individuals maintain the highest level of confidentiality, but you've got to realize when you start asking that many people, some of them are bound to start talking.
Isn't this specifically a 'hook-up' service portion of Loopt? Assume for example this scenario:
You're on dating site, which is mostly heterosexual. There's a lesbian woman on there, you don't immediately notice that her profile says "interested in: women" and message her and she then posts your picture and the message you sent (which may have been a cheesy pick-up line) for everyone to read. Would you like that?
It also seems far from certain that this was a "hookup." I go to "meetups" and talk to mostly men. Does this make me gay AND soliciting? (the answers are NO and NO, just to be extra clear!)
I think the hookup clue was "You wanna hang out later at my place?" I go to meetups and talk to mostly men too. But they tend not to invite me back to their apartment before we've met, though.
Well, maybe the author was just in a predominantly gay neighborhood.
My point is, if Loopt is about meeting local strangers... I mean... it seems like "hook-up application" is logically the most common use of that technology.
Can't you set Loopt to only show you your friends, though? (I don't use it because my phone doesnt' support it, and I'm too cheap to upgrade before I'm due for a discount, but I've seen it demoed a few times, looks interesting.)
Women are genetically predisposed to take hooking up a lot more seriously than we do. I'll spare you all the evolutionary psychology behind it, but suffice it to say that gay men operate just like straight men in that regard, but even if there were a million women on Loopt they wouldn't be doing that.
That may be true (about women) but my experience is that it's yet another bell curve and there are some very sexually active women who act more like men at one end of the tail.
That's true. All of the reasons why women are like that became unimportant when the pill was invented. The behavior largely persists due to its being ingrained, but nothing is absolute.
True. But the pill and other forms of protection have largely disconnected sex and procreation (or at least have made the connection optional). Also modern medicine has greatly reduced female deaths during pregnancy and child birth from something like a combined 1/3 to 5/1000. So the two major reasons why women are genetically predisposed to be more careful about hookups are largely (though not totally) eradicated.
It doesn't really seem like that far a stretch if you look at it in the lens of "the species Homo Sapien and its mating rituals". If a successful mating occurs, the woman cannot breed for at least 9 more months.
If a man successfully impregnates a woman, he can do it again as soon as he is physically able to commit the act again.
So it's in the woman's best interest to be selective while it is in the man's best interest to not be selective at all.
It's believed that women died in childbirth somewhere up to 1/4 of the time for most of our history (until a few thousand years ago, since when it's slowly but greatly improved) due to our enormous heads, which would probably be the largest reason. Plus they were rather less able than normal to fend for themselves for a few months right beforehand, and were too busy (if they wanted their little bundle of genes to survive anyway) to do so for a while after.
This almost makes me revise my deadpool opinion of Loopt. One of Zawinski's Laws was, "The secret to a successful social app: get people laid." They might have a slightly larger market if it was het, but they're well on their way...
You both can and can't control what your users decide to do with your application. After the community starts developing, though, your users can and most certainly do decide what YOU do with your application.
Hypothetically suppose, for the sake of argument, that the active Loopt community is currently gay men seeking companionship. If that is true, then Loopt is essentially doomed to use for any other purpose unless they excommunicate their current community and start over. If they try to rebrand themselves as, I don't know, Loopt: THE Place To Be For Tech-Savvy Entrepreneurs, then someone joining the non-existent "new" community will get contacted by the "old" community and, well, that's all she wrote for that user. Repeat for every user in the "new" community.
Similar examples of capture-by-community : Orkut can't be a global social network. Youtube can't have intelligent comments. Digg can't ever appeal to an older, femaler audience. Star Wars Galaxy can't be WoW, though they wanted to be (and promptly excommunicated both their old and new communities). etc, etc
Then the solution is not to rebrand to lose the existing audience, but to rebrand to keep that audience, and re-use the software in a new product with a new audience.
Most of the "cants" you referenced were likely not really possible, given the sort of product that they created. Social networking is most interesting with proximity. User-uploaded videos are mostly stupid, and attract stupid comments. Digg is intimidating in its design, which appeals to young male geeks more than old female nongeeks. People who want what WoW offers are already spending all their time playing WoW, and the same game with different graphics won't pull them away from the characters and relationships they're invested in. etc, etc
It's not necessarily a bad thing for users to have an effect on the direction your product goes. In fact, if properly harnessed, it can be incredibly positive.
Nah. Disco became mainstream, yet launched from gay clubs, which are in fact hookup-applications. There are quite a few other examples. Apparently these things do cross over.
"Have faith, Loopt, if your idea goes big somebody else will be around to capitalize on it!" does not strike me as something which would warm the heart of an investor.
Disco is a different beast. It's the synths that are mainstream not disco the genre. Synths were used by many other bands as well so I'm not sure what you mean by launched from gay clubs?
Same with LiveJournal and fandom, I guess. And they tried to get rid of fandom to reposition themselves towards a more mainstream audience, but that just ended up pissing off most of fandom and their new audience.
Perhaps I've interpreted your comment incorrectly, but I would hardly consider the fact that a preponderance of social networks eventually devolve into "hook-up sites" to be "encouraging". It may be a reflection of society, but I imagine some of those places could have more productive uses. Certainly not HotOrNot, but Loopt?
Of course the other explanation is that these are simply "sexbots" - The same bots that IM every single person who ever logs on to Yahoo Messenger with something like "Hey wanna see my webcam? I'm free tonight wink"
so why doesn't loopt just tweak the code a little and give the user an option to ban all the m4m from showing up on your list? (I mean for those random messages, not your friend's list)
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html