Glassmap (YC S11) Launches A Better “Find My Friends”

It's nice, but they're going to have a really hard time competing with Latitude and Find my Friends, given that they're baked in.<p><i>there’s also a company philosophy that realtime location sharing is the future. They believe that startups like Foursquare, which requires manual updating, represent out-of-date technology.</i><p>While I'll agree that check-ins are a little messy, they represent an important difference that goes unmentioned- I check in when I want people to know where I am. At all other times, my location is unknown.<p>That's important to me. I don't want everyone knowing where I am on demand- not that I'm doing anything shady, but it just weirds me out and I don't see the benefit in it. Glympse and my own project, Taxonomy (<a href="http://www.taxono.my" rel="nofollow">http://www.taxono.my</a>) do selective sharing- I manually choose who I want to share with, and when. For me, that's much better. But maybe I'm not representative of most people?

Deriding Foursquare as "low tech" reminds me of Balmer bragging about how you could use Zune's wifi to share a song with a girl and Steve Jobs suggesting you just give her one ear bud.

While I do think it's a step up from Find My Friends in that you can share your location with people who aren't on iOS, is the underlying technology really any different than Find My Friends?<p>When I pull Find My Friends up, I'm fairly certain it's doing exactly what this "killer feature" relay technology is doing. The app tells me when the location was last grabbed, and it appears to refresh a friends location when I ask to to rather than a continual update (where the user's phone is pushing its location). Although, I may be wrong about how the Find My Friends app works.

I dont understand why they would drop out of school for this. Seems like its been done before and the appeal is supposed to be that it doesnt drain your battery as fast ?<p>I think they need some new features or something to pull people from Loopt, Tagged, etc. I dont see why they couldnt do this while in school. To each their own though

I'm really not seeing the value in the app. Sure, the potential for revenue is huge through location-based advertising, but as an end user I can't see myself using this more than once or twice.<p>It's also kind of creepy. Granted, it's opt in, but given enough social pressure lots of people who would normally not use something like this will opt in reluctantly.<p>The "relay" system sound ingenious though. One project I worked on last year had to do with location based messaging. The problem that we had was with battery life and the fact that updating location passively is a huge battery drain. Although it was just a proof of concept app, we probably should have spent more time looking at the problem from another angle like these guys.

Glassmap seems to have a lot of overlap with Loopt and I'm curious if it ever becomes a delicate situation when YC (or any startup fund) invests in competing/overlapping/replacement companies.<p>(apologies if YC no longer has an interest in Loopt)