Text away with your friends!

Today we added “reply-all” text messaging to Loopt. What does that mean? It means now you can send messages where replies go to all recipients. It’s kind of like being in a chat room or a group email thread, except it’s via text messaging on your mobile phone.

 

Reply-all messaging is useful when you’re coordinating something with a group of friends or simply want to banter away with some buddies. For instance, instead of calling your friends individually to decide which bar to meet at, just ask the group “Where do you want to meet?” using the reply-all feature and let the group decide. Or, you might take a photo of your professor and talk about how funny his combover looks with your friends just to pass the time during a lecture. (Don’t blame us if you get caught!)

To use reply-all messaging all you have to do is select multiple friends while Sharing What’s Up or sending a group message from Loopt. Now when you select more than one friend, you’ll see an option to "Turn on Reply-All". Checking the box lets your friends reply to the group. Once you’re ready to leave a conversation, just reply to the last text message with the command “LEAVE”. For more info, check out the FAQ.

Here's an example of how Bob sent a reply all message. He saw something funny and wanted to share it with this classmates, so he started a group message, checked "Turn on Reply All", and sent it. All his friends were able to see the message, who he sent it to, and reply so everyone else can see, too.

Hopefully, you’ll find many fun and useful ways to use this new messaging feature. It’s simple, but we think it’s powerful. As always, we’re always looking for feedback on new features so let us know what you think!

Happy Valentine's Day!

From all of us at Loopt.

(logo props to Fede, our awesome graphics designer)

Our City Forest: 5 months in!

A few months back, we noted Loopt's collaboration with a team of AmeriCorps members at Our City Forest. These twenty two members, over the duration of 10 months, are helping cultivate San Jose and the greater Bay Area into a greener, healthier urban environment by educating residents and volunteers on the proper way to plant and care for trees, and the overarching goals of creating a greener community.

Since the program began in late October, the teams have been using the Loopt service to communicate with each other when working on different teams, making sure their carpool buddies didn't oversleep, steering each other from getting lost on the road, and of course, getting together for events and random fun. They've been also very helpful to the Loopt team, providing valuable feedback on ways we can improve the usability of the product.

We joined one of the teams for a planting project one fine Saturday morning, and brought a camera along, too.

Here, Monte is teaching the Boy Scouters how to properly place a tree during planting.

The Our City Forest AmeriCorps members (in green) with a team of goofy Boy Scouters (and dads)