

Glassmap (YC S11) Launches A Better “Find My Friends” - geoffwoo
http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/16/yc-backed-glassmap-launches-a-find-my-friends-for-facebook-users-on-iphone-android/

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untog
It's nice, but they're going to have a really hard time competing with
Latitude and Find my Friends, given that they're baked in.

 _there’s also a company philosophy that realtime location sharing is the
future. They believe that startups like Foursquare, which requires manual
updating, represent out-of-date technology._

While I'll agree that check-ins are a little messy, they represent an
important difference that goes unmentioned- I check in when I want people to
know where I am. At all other times, my location is unknown.

That's important to me. I don't want everyone knowing where I am on demand-
not that I'm doing anything shady, but it just weirds me out and I don't see
the benefit in it. Glympse and my own project, Taxonomy
(<http://www.taxono.my>) do selective sharing- I manually choose who I want to
share with, and when. For me, that's much better. But maybe I'm not
representative of most people?

~~~
joeblossom
I think I agree with you for the most part.

I do use Find My Friends for two reasons, one is to share my location with my
very, very close friends (4 people) as I really don't care if they know.

Second, my wife is a teacher at an inner city school here in Atlanta. The
school is located in a pretty bad area, and I like to know she made it to/from
school safely.

Beyond that, I don't use it for anything else. I do find apps like
foursquare/path much more interesting from the sharing a location standpoint.

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staunch
Deriding Foursquare as "low tech" reminds me of Balmer bragging about how you
could use Zune's wifi to share a song with a girl and Steve Jobs suggesting
you just give her one ear bud.

~~~
itmag
So his message is basically that Microsoft users are creepy beta orbiters who
have to send songs to girls on the Internet, while Mac fans are suave
lotharios who get to enjoy actual physical proximity with girls instead? Good
marketing there...

(We all know what Unix people are up to: arcane invocations to fsck daemons to
gain access to remote mounting privileges _shudder_ ).

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joeblossom
While I do think it's a step up from Find My Friends in that you can share
your location with people who aren't on iOS, is the underlying technology
really any different than Find My Friends?

When I pull Find My Friends up, I'm fairly certain it's doing exactly what
this "killer feature" relay technology is doing. The app tells me when the
location was last grabbed, and it appears to refresh a friends location when I
ask to to rather than a continual update (where the user's phone is pushing
its location). Although, I may be wrong about how the Find My Friends app
works.

~~~
mikeash
That's definitely what FMF does. If you happen to be watching your phone when
somebody else tries to fetch your location, you'll see the location services
icon appear in the status bar for a couple of seconds while it does its thing.
It's not transmitting anything about your position except when people are
actually looking for you.

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zanek
I dont understand why they would drop out of school for this. Seems like its
been done before and the appeal is supposed to be that it doesnt drain your
battery as fast ?

I think they need some new features or something to pull people from Loopt,
Tagged, etc. I dont see why they couldnt do this while in school. To each
their own though

~~~
veyron
tl;dr: skating to where the puck will be, not where it is now.

I think they are positioning themselves for the ubiquity of location-based
technologies.

By the end of 2013 I fully expect more energy efficient solutions to
geolocation to be integrated in cellular phones or whatever we may see in
terms of wireless connectivity. I also suspect there will be a social
acceptance, if not necessarily embrace, of LBS. But in order to take advantage
of the opportunity, they actually need to be in the field.

The technology is emerging: [http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4236252/TI-
announces-fiv...](http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4236252/TI-announces-
five-radio-combo-chip)

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jwwest
I'm really not seeing the value in the app. Sure, the potential for revenue is
huge through location-based advertising, but as an end user I can't see myself
using this more than once or twice.

It's also kind of creepy. Granted, it's opt in, but given enough social
pressure lots of people who would normally not use something like this will
opt in reluctantly.

The "relay" system sound ingenious though. One project I worked on last year
had to do with location based messaging. The problem that we had was with
battery life and the fact that updating location passively is a huge battery
drain. Although it was just a proof of concept app, we probably should have
spent more time looking at the problem from another angle like these guys.

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callmeed
Glassmap seems to have a lot of overlap with Loopt and I'm curious if it ever
becomes a delicate situation when YC (or any startup fund) invests in
competing/overlapping/replacement companies.

(apologies if YC no longer has an interest in Loopt)

~~~
webwright
YC would be able to invest in very few companies if it avoided companies that
compete/overlap.

