Loopt MySpace Profile

We just refreshed our MySpace profile with lots of new photos and videos. Check it out and, if you're on MySpace, will you add us as your friend?: www.myspace.com/looptdotcom

Wall Street Journal’s Cool Journal Widget

Andy Jordan, a tech reporter from the Wall Street Journal, is on a cross-country trip to highlight people, communities, and companies at the forefront of the economic stimulus and conversion to a greener economy. He’s driving a hybrid car from New York to the ECO:Nomics conference in California. The Loopt Journal Widget below is featured on his American Journey blog to track his adventures and he says “it’s worked beautifully.” Read more about his trip at: http://blogs.wsj.com/american-journey.

You can share your Loopt Journal with any of your friends on your blogs or social networks with the Loopt Journal Widget too. To create a Journal Widget, just log-in to your Loopt account online at loopt.com, and click on the “Get your Journal Widget” link to get started. You can also go here to create and place your Loopt Journal Widget (it’s as easy as copying and pasting).

If you think you have a cool Loopt Journal Widget, e-mail us at blog@loopt.com and we’ll share it here!

Blackberry Bold and LG Dare Get Loopt

You may have noticed that two new phones popped up on our supported phones list (http://www.loopt.com/phones) last week. For those of you who missed it…

Loopt is now on AT&T’s Blackberry Bold as well as Verizon’s LG Dare! If you have one of these phones, go to loopt.com to get Loopt.

Just another step in our never-ending quest to make sure you can use Loopt with all your friends. Loopt is now available over 100 mobile devices, including the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, and across all major U.S. carriers (including Sprint, Verizon, Boost, MetroPCS, AT&T, and T-Mobile).

Enjoy Loopt and don’t forget to visit our forum if you have any comments, ideas, or questions.

We're also planning on releasing a major update to our Blackberry apps later this year so stay tuned!

Share What’s Up: Ian on Git

One of the great things about working at a startup in Silicon Valley is the plethora of opportunities to learn about new technology and experiment with methodologies to find a good fit for your business and your team. Loopt is particularly encouraging of this sort of exploration of new ideas, sponsoring a series of lunches at which our development team can learn new technologies from local experts. This week we were visited by Scott Chacon of GitHub (http://github.com/), who was kind enough to take time out of his day to do a talk about Git.

Git is an open source, distributed source control system which has gained a lot of popularity in the last few years (a source control system is software that allows several developers to work on the same project/files without destroying one another's work). Git’s software is world-class. Its distributed nature and the ease with which it allows branching and merging of the source tree really lends itself to the kind of development environment in which developers are always experimenting with features and incubating new ideas without adding bugs to the main project.

We’re always looking for technologies that allow us to concentrate on delivering a great experience to the Loopt community rather than fighting with development tools, and, so far, Git looks like it could be a great fit.

-Ian

Ian is on the mobile development team at Loopt.

Find a Date with Loopt Mix

Current TV's Ben Hoffman uses Loopt Mix to find a date.  Watch and see if he finds true love or is back to the drawing board... 

Have you used Loopt Mix to find a date?  Let us know!  We love entertaining Loopt Mix stories.

Loopt is for Lovers

What was the location of your best or worst (your choice!) Valentine’s Day date?

The best two stories (as selected by a seasoned panel of Loopt judges in combination with blog comments) will be rewarded with a $25 gift card to help take your sweetheart out on the town - or go partying with friends. Whatever fits your plans this year!

Loopt’s on AT&T!

We’ve arrived at the moment we’ve all been waiting for – Loopt is now available on these popular AT&T phones!:

Motorola V9x
Motorola Z9n
Nokia 6650
Pantech c610
Pantech Matrix
Samsung a637
Samsung Propel
Samsung Rugby
Sony Ericsson w760a

We’re really excited to team up with AT&T and offer Loopt to their customers. It is another giant leap forward in our goal to make the service available on as many devices and carriers as possible so that you can use Loopt with all your friends. To make sure you don’t miss any opportunities to hang out with your friends, the AT&T network enables background location updating even when the service is not running. If you have one of these AT&T phones, try out Loopt for free for the first 14 days by registering at www.loopt.com. After the first 14 days, there is a $3.99/month fee.

As always, please let us know about your experience by e-mailing us at feedback@loopt.com with your comments, ideas, and questions so that we can continue to improve Loopt and help you discover and navigate the world around you.

AT&T customers, welcome to the Loopt community!

Loopt Mix in Action: Matchin’ (Valentine's Day Edition)

If you have Loopt on your iPhone, check out Loopt Mix. Loopt Mix allows you to connect with other members of the Loopt community nearby who share common interests and affiliations. We asked Loopt Mix users to share their best Loopt Mix story with us - here's what Jeff had to say:

 

 

“I turned on Loopt Mix and, within about two hours, I had a coffee date and we're pretty much smitten with one another. I deleted my Match.com $40/month membership and told them that Loopt helped me achieve in 1 hour what I had been paying Match.com hundreds of dollars to do. Anyways, I'm just so happy I'm telling everyone about Loopt.”

If you have an entertaining Loopt Mix story, e-mail it to us at blog@loopt.com and we'll share it here!

p.s. - It's not too late to find your Valentine's Day date on Loopt Mix!

With Loopt, Never Be Lonely, Bored, or Hungry Again

That’s what I said back in June at the Apple Developer Conference when I introduced the Loopt service on the iPhone. It’s hard to believe that we’re already into February 2009. I want to thank all of you for growing with us as we continue to improve the Loopt service. We remain committed to helping you discover and navigate the ever-changing world around you.

Last year, we made solid progress toward our goal to build a ubiquitous interoperable network so that you can use Loopt with all your friends. To that end, Loopt is now available on more than 100 mobile devices, including the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry, and across all major U.S. carriers (including Sprint, Verizon, Boost, MetroPCS, AT&T, and T-Mobile). In fact, we find that over 50 percent of Loopt friend invites are sent between different phones and networks.

Based on your feedback, we delivered a number of enhancements to the service including the integration of content from Yelp to help you make plans with friends on the go. We introduced new features like Loopt Mix to help you meet and connect with new people nearby. We’ve also added tools like Loopt Link that can simultaneously update and share your Loopt experience with all your social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. Over the next few months, look for more service enhancements and new features as we continue to build upon and expand the service to meet your needs for actionable, real-world information.

Noted above are just a few of the milestones that we reached over the last year. However, what I’m most excited to share is the growth and activity we experienced in the Loopt community. Last year, we saw the community grow to more than 1 million users. These include people that have used Loopt to find surfing buddies, reunite with long lost friends, keep in touch with family while on the road, share historical experiences, enhance their blog with location updates, and more.

We love hearing stories like these from the Loopt community. It really makes the long hours our team spends working on the service worth it. And please, as always, continue to let us know what you’d like to see with regard to new features, privacy controls, and advertising. Your feedback is invaluable in helping us improve Loopt so keep it coming. We look forward to meeting more of you and continuing to build a robust and vibrant community.

-Sam Altman

Founder & CEO

From the Friend List: Where the Wild Things Are

Please welcome our first guest blogger, Bud Caddell. Bud is a Strategist at the New York based digital think-tank, UnderCurrent. Bud will be popping in to the Loopt blog every now and then to share his musings with us. Bud will also be joining our CEO and founder, Sam Altman, on a panel at SXSW on March 17. Stay tuned for more details.

Live Action Roleplayers, or LARPERS.

Once upon a time, the internet was supposed to be a great homogenizer. With common information, in common places, we were all supposed to become one mass audience – ripe for the picking.

But the same was said for television, and radio before it (and someone promised me a jet-pack).

When will we learn?

It's true that the internet's promise is one of connection: whatever our appetite, we can find others like us offering the means to satiate that hunger. As human beings, we're accustomed to defining our peer groups through exclusion as well as inclusion; so we use our tastes and fan preferences in these mediated spaces to make strong connections among the like minded. Generally, the more obscure the area of interest, the closer we feel to our fellow fans. Because of this, we find the most emotionally positive response from organizing around our niche tastes (no one understands a Trekkie like another Trekkie). The internet didn't invent fandom, it's just helping fan communities be more organized and empowered than ever before.

When you're a fan and you feel connected to something larger than yourself, you invest your time and attention in exchange for social currency. You offer up participation in the hopes of finding and growing those special connections. The more you study fan communities the more you see that these groups are demonstrating complex behaviors even before technology rushes to keep up. Case in point, skateboarders were exchanging videos of themselves long before YouTube or Break (even before Al Gore invented the internet). But when YouTube came along, they embraced the technology wholeheartedly. The behavior existed long before technology made it easier and more addictive.

So with each new jump in technology, I'm less interested in mass application and more interested in how our LARPERS in the woods will use it (or fan communities in general). Mapping their behaviors to emerging technologies can be a great exercise in considering what's next. And now we find ourselves with a sophisticated device that fits in the palm of our hand and enables us to connect the web with our physical location in the world. If you consider the power of tightly connected groups and their obsessions, there's no limit on what you can offer.

Take for example Free Runners. Free Runners use a combination of acrobatics and gymnastics to traverse cityscapes in feats of absolute aerial and terrestrial insanity. Free running takes place in large urban areas where obstacles are common. Even though Free Running stresses creativity more so than traditional parkour, Free Runners are incredibly disciplined; their artful movements require a good deal of strength and mental focus.

Like skateboarders before them, Free Runners love to upload videos of themselves doing what they do. You get to show off, share new moves, and generally blow peoples' minds. And like skateboarding, Free Running is quickly becoming the new cool sport to co-opt in commercials because it's relatively new and it's a global phenomenon (K-Swiss, Vodafone, Coca-Cola). And one more time, like skateboarding, merely using free running in your ad won't buy you credibility for long with that growing crowd. You have to stand for something more and provide entertainment, utility, or a service.

Luckily, we've got technology. You can already upload and geo-tag videos to YouTube. And mobile devices like my iPhone are great at playing YouTube videos and assessing my physical location in the world. So where's the Free Running app sponsored by Red Bull or Gatorade or Amp or Adidas that unlocks a Free Running world around me? As I stand in front of a park and hold my phone out in front of me, why can't I watch clips of my local free running friends? Why can't I have a friend video me right there with my phone to upload to YouTube and be instantly accessible? Why couldn't my video battle other videos from the same park in ongoing localized competitions? And why can't I (as someone who in reality has no ability to free run) just download the app and go crazy exploring my city and the fanatical people that live here?

It may sound like an obscure use of available tech, but go look at the video views on YouTube, look at the attention the sport is getting; its obscurity fueled mass interest. And then consider that this one specific use could be applied across the spectrum of other extreme communities: skateboarding, cycling, snowboarding, and graffiti.

There's so much that can be done with mobile and location based services; but who can you reach that will miss you when your gone?

I hope I at least get you to say, "hmmm."