Keep your eyes peeled for SpotJots, a promising experiment in social networking that lets people see, read about and hear where their friends are.
The mobile multimedia blogging service, developed by the Ten23 mobile-dispatch software company in Fullerton, just won first place in a location-based software contest sponsored by geographic data provider Navteq.
SpotJots is like Twitter, but with a map showing the blogger’s location, photos taken there with a cell phone, and even audio for those who want to add that option.
It’s barely out of the starting blocks in a tough race to win the hearts, minds, and mobile devices of social networkers, but that competition is still “wide open,” in the words of tech blogger Michael Arrington. (More from him below.)
If you’re interested, you can try it out. Ten23 opened SpotJots to a free public beta test last week at www.spotjots.com, which works with standard Web browsers.
Sample posts from the site:
- Quick recaps from various Ducks hockey games, with photos from the stands.
- Comments and photos from travelers in Italy, Las Vegas, plus photos of some guy sleeping in the back seat on the 15 on the way to Vegas.
- Note and photos from “James” in Panama, who watched the Queen Victoria cruise ship pass through the canal.
- A scattering of short restaurant reviews, with photos.
Winners in the the 2008 Navteq LBS Challenge for location-based software were announced April 2. Top prize was $50,000 in cash, plus $225,000 in Navteq data licenses and up to $250,000 in sponsor-donated licenses.
In addition, SpotJots Mobile for the BlackBerry lets users post notes, pictures and audio from a mobile device directly to an individual SpotJots blog. For phones that are GPS-enabled, a geotag can be added automatically.
Ten23 said posts can be routed automatically to individual accounts in Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter and Typepad.
Nokia and iPhone versions of SpotJots, in private beta, will be released publicly soon, the company said.
Early competition for SpotJots includes Facebook’s iPhone site and others such as ZYB, Mocospace and Mig33.
But, as tech blogger Arrington said in today’s post “I Saw the Future of Social Networking the Other Day”:
The space is wide open at this point - no one has created an application that has gotten enough traction to go mainstream. That’s party because of tech limitations - browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations.
Arrington thinks he has seen the eventual winner in this race, but can’t disclose the name. (It’s not SpotJots.)
I believe in the idea so much that I explored putting together a team to build a basic network on top of the iPhone SDK. But I abandoned that idea last week when I saw a live demo, on the iPhone, of an upcoming social network that does everything I called for. …
… the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.
Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going. And the startup thinks they’ve found a way around the fact that third party iPhone applications can’t run in the background (meaning you’d have to have the application open, and not use any other iPhone features, to run the social network and see others). They explained the work around in general terms to me, but asked that it remain confidential for now.
As I said, I saw the app running on an iPhone and even the early prototype left me speechless. It will, I believe, prove to be very popular, and very valuable.
For more on Ten23 Software, see my October 2006 column “Whither Web 2.0?”
