

Loopt Has Become a hook-up Application - tlrobinson
http://dailytechtalk.com/2008/09/loopt-has-become-a-hookup-application/

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bd
So by JWZ's maxim they are really poised to succeed.

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html>

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msie
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?

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derefr
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.

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DaniFong
Sure, it's probably legal, but people need to make their own judgments on what
should be kept private and what not. It's still a jerk thing to do.

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axod
And messaging complete strangers trying to get laid isn't?

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kirse
Sorry axod, they're right.

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.

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boucher
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.

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jimbokun
Need to increase the sensitivity on your sarcasm detector just a tad.

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IsaacSchlueter
"Has become"?? When _wasn't_ it a hookup application?

It's as if the writer is surprised that a location-aware gender-specific
social software (with pictures!) would be used to find dates.

Um. How long have you been with this species? You know "hook up" is like, most
of what we _do_ , right? Humans make bunnies look prude by comparison.

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mattmaroon
It's maybe much of what men try to do anyway. Still I never would have
expected that Loopt was mainly about gay hookups.

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IsaacSchlueter
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.)

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mattmaroon
I've never used Loopt. I thought it existed to tell you when people you knew
were nearby.

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Dilpil
If only there were as many horny single straight women as there are horny
single gay men.

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mattmaroon
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.

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einarvollset
Matt, buddy.. If that's what you need to tell yourself ;-)

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mattmaroon
Ha, classic. I'm married though, so I need to tell myself a lot more than
that.

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nostrademons
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...

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patio11
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

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DaniFong
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.

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patio11
"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.

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apgwoz
... and Plenty of Fish is a Hookup site. This can't be bad.

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nostrademons
FaceBook too, and HotOrNot. This seems to be a universally encouraging
development...

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tdavis
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?

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nostrademons
Encouraging for Loopt. Not really for the rest of us, unless you're seeking a
gay hookup on Boost, Verizon, or the iPhone...

~~~
tdavis
I suppose, if they can find a way to monetize anonymous gay hook-ups.

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axod
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_ "

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vaksel
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)

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petercooper
Why the capital on "Hookup"? I only read the piece because I thought it was an
acquisition or "Hookup" was a new framework Loopt had switched to :)

