Archive for October, 2011
Apple launches “me too” friend finder app with iOS 5
Yesterday Apple launched their own geosocial networking app with iOS 5 called “Find My Friends“.
Find My Friends is an extension of the existing Find My iPhone feature which was included in the mobile Me service.
Find My Friends tips its hat to several established geosocial networking apps with venue checkins similar to FourSquare, Gowalla, Plyce and Facebook Places; time-limited sharing similar to Glympse; and background sharing similar to Google Latitude and of course Locle.
Interestingly, even though the Find My Friends app has OS privileges not available to third party apps, it doesn’t offer “killer” features such as Serendipity or use the bluetooth stack.
Since the Find My Friends service is only available on iOS, it will be interesting to see if it can gain the critical mass and network effects to take off as a social app; or if it will simply join the growing list of me too geosocial apps that have emerged in the past couple of years.
It is unlikely that Apple will provide an API for third party developers to release apps for non-iOS platforms.
