Nokia Friends View via Beta Labs

[Rafe]

The application / service Nokia Friend View, which has been made available on Nokia Beta Labs today, is a combined location and micro-blogging application. It allows you to share your location (automatically using GPS or network-based location or manually) with you friends and see where they are. However it also includes a component that lets you add status updates (posts) thus brining in a micro-blogging element.

Read on in the full article.

I don't want anybody to know where I am.

[slitchfield]

Not even your manually-added and trusted friends? Wow, that's some private life!

Stefan, soab, he made it ! )

[Arthur]

Not interested in broadcasting my location to anyone... manually added friend or not.

[tkboxer]

So is this application similar to Twitter? Does it need to always run in the background, if so, wouldn't the program with continuous gps location updating be a real drain on battery life? From a network point of view, is a message sent in Friend View considered a text message and credited accordingly to ones account?

[malerocks]

I agree with unregistered and Arthur - however close my friends and family are, I am not comfortable uploading my locations to them and letting them know where I am or where I have been (even though I may not have been to any controversial locations ) The idea is good, but certain aspects of my life I would prefer to keep to myself and this according to me is an absolute violation of privacy.

This is probably equivalent of constantly letting people know what you are doing every moment you are in your room.

A way this may be useful could be when you go on a vacation. You could keep your family and friends informed on what ground you are covering.

[Nemoi]

I like it and at least the mobile version seems to work good already. And you can choose whether you attach your position to your post, you do not send all details to your friends.

[slitchfield]

Yep. AND you only have to post when you want to. It's a purely voluntary thing.

Like Nokia Chat, Buddy Ping and many other similar services though, this sort of thing is really only a tech demo until something gets mass acceptance and you get to the point where most of your friends are 'online' in a similar way, with compatible software. That's going to take a while.

Friend View also seems to be very heavy on data. Bringing up a simple line map and posting a couple of messages burned through 200k. Which seems excessive. And the maps aren't cached, so if you exit the app and then go back in, without changing location, they're grabbed again, etc.

Better still would be to use Nokia Maps data, if present on the memory card, in which case you'd just be paying to send a few kilobytes for the actual messages, which is far friendlier to the mass market pay-as-you-go purse.

Steve Litchfield

[tenoce]

@Steve: yepp, it has the same issue as Sportstracker, however there is a promise that future updates will be able to use onboard maps.

Nokia Friends View is a perfect fit to the acquisition of the German Plazes, the location based social community site.

IMHO there is a huge demand of publishing someones whereabouts to closed friends groups, especially in the younger generation.

This is could be huge if done right for certain situations:
1) how many times you go shopping with friends or girlfriend or wife or kids and you agree to meet at certain place at certain time. Than of course people are running late, places get confused, etc. U turn the tracker on and you just meet the rest of your group at any time and at a place works best for everybody.
2) For any parent with teenage kids??
3) For any parent with a baby sitter and a kid (this is where I love to get pictures of my four year old on Ovi Share during the day while I am in the office or travelling).

Probably there could be many other situations....

Can't even login all I get is 'HTTP time out'

I got repeated phone restarts while setting this up on an E61. It started working properly only after I set location preciseness to "Approximate only", i.e. after I set it not to look for a GPS module.

Works well on the E90 though.

The speed of downloads and updates leaves much to be desired - I don't find it fast enough yet to be used in a real life scenario. I am on GPRS speeds - probably that has something to do with it.

And why does the default location have to be Finland - since this app is capable of determining one's location from the network, maybe it could do that first and show an approximate location. Scrolling all the way from Finland to India is painful , especially since you have to do it blind - as mentioned above, the maps take quite a bit of time to download.

slitchfield and all other interested people out there,
Friend View DOES CACHE the maps, and they are also shared with Nokia Sports Tracker The problem is that they sometimes take a while, even coming from the cache. We know there is some improvement here and we are working on it, hoping this feels faster and clearer soon. Meanwhile, don´t worry about being downloading every time you start Friend View, it doesn't happen like that.

And please don't hesitate on sending us feedback through our web, client, or through Beta Labs' site.

Regards,
Friend View team

This in an interesting program. To those of you who have such an issue about your whereabouts being broadcasted to those in your social circle: this is VOLUNTARY! You don't have to display your location if you don't want to. If you have that much of a problem with the concept behind this program then don't use it! Simple! I hope I can get some of my family and friends to buy N Series phones since none of them even know about them. I live in the United States where Symbian remains relatively unknown to all save for a few avid cell phone users(like myself).