Location-based social networking developer goGlyph has released a free application for iOS users today. Also called goGlyph, it allows you to drop messages, or “glyphs”, at your location, and check what other glyphs have been left here.
What’s the story?
It’s a pretty simple idea. Whenever you create a glyph, you leave it at your location. The glyph comprises a 22o-character text message, with the option of leaving a clickable HTML link with it.
You can also check for glyphs nearby. You set the distance that the app is to check at (ranging from 10 meters to a kilometer), and it will return all the glyphs in the area. As you can see from the sample video below, this is also something that retailers can use to advertise special deals and promo’s to users nearby:
What we think?
goGlyph has a kind of Egyptian theme going on. Quite apart from users being referred to as “scribes” and their messages as “glyphs”, the graphics have a few hieroglyphic-style elements to them.
See?
What chance does this app have of surviving? I wouldn’t be too confident that it will have a million users any time soon. It’s a perfectly serviceable app, it really is. It does the job it has been designed for very well. But it’s at swim in a sea of similar, and often better, applications. Let’s take a look at the retail potential, for example. shopkick already does this, and it’s got major consumer and brand backing.
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Thanks for the article Cian, this sounds like an interesting location based mobile social networking app for iPhone users. Unfortunately for retailers offering promotions, this is only available to iOS users, which severely limits their potential reach.With the majority of the over 5 billion mobile phones out there today not being smartphones, retailers need a way to maximize their mobile social networking audience and SMS can be used to acheive this. My company, Cherple, aims to help the billions of non-smartphone users out there by providing SMS-based mobile social networking. SMS provides the perfect means to keep non-smartphone users engaged in social networking while on the go, by easily communicating between an online device and a mobile phone. The Cherple platform is not only a great social media tool for users, it is appealing to advertisers, as we can offer in-text ads, which ensure views, unlike the haphazard banners you see on popular web-based social networking sites. Thanks for the read!