Glympse: A Hassle And Worry-Free Way To Share Your Location, Minus The Social Network
We’ve all been there. You’re late for a meeting with friends, stuck in traffic and unsure of when you’re actually going to arrive. You call them with updates like “well, I’m closer now, but still not sure…” and a shaky “maybe I’ll be there in 20 minutes?” What if your friends could track exactly where you were without the frustrating back and forth? Glympse, a new location-based service that is decidedly not another social network, is looking to help you do just that. Glympse is launching tonight on Android, and is coming soon to the iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and “other leading smartphone devices” (read: Palm).
Now, Glympse isn’t the first application that allows you to share your location with friends. But while other services like Loopt ask you to create a permanent connection with your peers, Glympse recognizes that oftentimes we don’t want all of our contacts to know our current whereabouts. Sure, you could adjust privacy settings on a per-user basis to specify who to share your location with and when, but that’s a hassle and can be easy to forget about. So Glympse takes a different approach, instead asking you to create temporary connections with other people that last for a maximum of four hours. The service doesn’t have any concept of long-time friends - you establish a connection, and it’s gone four hours (or less) later.
Glympse is the kind of application that sounds a little pointless at first, but the more you think about it, the more you realize how great the service could be.
Check also related entries: