MLS in Amsterdam

It's really exciting to see location-based services take off. We heard a lot of great stories (and shared ours) at the Mobile Location Services 2007 conference in Amsterdam. People are building cool products and users are more excited than ever.

The ongoing conversation about the balance between user privacy and maximizing usefulness made a lot of progress, and we think the global community is getting to the right place.

One challenge facing everyone building large-scale location-aware services is how different the environment is by carrier and country. At loopt, wethink about solutions to this all of the time, and are hopeful that a solution is in the not too distant future.

Fun Pictures from Around the Office

Color Coordination! Sometimes great minds think alike...sometimes it's just a coincidence. :)

Bluetooth Bonanza! Fred doing his best Ken look alike.

Back in DC

Last week, we attended and sponsored a half-day conference in DC hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus. Entitled “Location Meets Social Networking Dialogue,” the conference introduced legislators and regulators on the Hill to the range of issues presented by emerging location technologies like loopt. Mark spoke on a couple of the panels, engaging in some very productive discussions about some of things we should be doing as an industry to address these issues proactively. The turnout was great, and it’s really encouraging to see everyone- industry, legislators, safety advocates and regulators- taking the time to really understand the technology and issues. Experts ranging from Larry Magid and Anne Collier from ConnectSafely.com, Professors Norman Sadeh from Carnegie Mellon and Peter Swire from Ohio State, to Jim Dempsey from the Center for Democracy and Technology participated, and it was a great chance to meet other online safety advocates. (If you'd like to see video clips from the conference, click here.)

“Social Mapping”

One of the things we needed to do as we were preparing for our public launch last fall with Boost was to decide how to describe what we did.

Since our inception loopt's primary reason for being has been to answer the world's most common question ("where are you?") and the features we built (see your friends on a map, send proximity-based messages, get friend alerts) were all about achieving this vision. But we needed a phrase to describe ourselves in a way that was pithy, accurate, evocative, and memorable. And since we were doing something new we wanted the phrase to be new, not a derivation of a term already in use. Not an easy challenge.

We kicked around many ideas, but Tom and Evan came up with the clear winner: "social mapping". We knew it was the winner because the internal reaction, as it always is with a really good idea, was to wonder what took us so long to find the obvious best answer.

We liked "social mapping" for many reasons: it's short, it has a nice double meaning with "mapping" (i.e. both the actual maps we display as well as the social planning that people do), people seem to immediately "get it," and it's large enough to encompass not just the "friend finding" aspect of loopt but all the things we expect people to do with loopt: finding restaurants, planning events, messaging nearby friends, journaling their lives, and tagging their favorite places. You know, social mapping.

We also like social mapping because of what it's not. It's not "friend finding," which is both a pretty limited idea and seems to imply finding new friends, something we're not about. And it's not "social networking," "mobile social networking," or worst of all "MoSoSo". Not that we don't love social networks; services like the Facebook have been an inspiration for loopt since our inception. It’s a great product, and many of us use it heavily. But you use social networks very differently than how you use loopt. It's more than just our emphasis on location information, which we like to think is an essential form of social context, it's that our service is almost exclusively about communicating and interacting with the handful of friends you hang out with most often.

In any case, we've been gratified to see the term start to take hold. It's been used in everything from major newspapers and conferences to countless blogs. In fact we spoke last week in Washington at a conference dedicated specifically to educating legislators and regulators about social mapping. Searching Google reveals 67,500 references, and our good friends at Boost seem to have bought the AdWord. Now we just need someone to add it to wikipedia and we can safely say we've coined a phrase.