We’re extremely excited to announce that we’ve integrated with Twitter for sharing your location with your friends. If you’re headed out, look up your destination on Outalot and click “Check in Via Twitter”. Outalot will send a tweet to your Twitter account, so your friends can find out what it’s like, and where it’s at. Also, Outalot will update your location to the place you’re headed, so when you’re leaving the bar and need a late night snack, we’ll help you find the one that’s just steps out the front door.
Many people have asked us how we’ll make it easier for users to let others know where they are through Outalot. Will we introduce a category called “Friends”? Will we push alerts to let you know that a friend is within a few miles of your current location? The release of several GPS-enabled phones, including yesterday’s announcement about the 3G, GPS-enabled iPhone, stokes our and other developers’ imagination with possibilities.
The issue, of course, with letting others know your whereabouts through an application is privacy. In a simple interface, how do you set limitations on what level of detail people can see about your current location? Which social networks do you tie into to let people know where you are? Once you start listing out all the possibilites, you see that a complex interface is needed to handle LBS friend-finding. We’d hate to introduce unnecessary complexity into Outalot.
One step, we feel, in the right direction is not asking users to re-create a social network. We believe that the last thing someone wants to do at this point is reconstruct the network they already have in Facebook or Friendster. In addition, we are not convinced that a push alerting system is user-friendly, so we wanted a service where users would pull information about their friends’ location.
That’s why we decided to work with Twitter’s APIs in order to integrate sharing your location with others via Outalot. Here are some benefits to checking in via Twitter:
- You can control who sees your location through your Twitter privacy controls. In other words, you can elect for the whole world to see where you check in, or have your updates only go to select friends.
- You can also use the Twitter Facebook application in order to update your status in Facebook. The daisy chain of Outalot » Twitter » Facebook again prevents users from having to recreate any social networks or privacy controls within Outalot.
- Finally, we don’t even require that you have a registered user account with us to take advantage of this feature
Please let us know what you think about our Twitter integration!
Posted by Joe
