Nokia Friend View via Beta Labs
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 your friends and see where they are, or at least where they were when they last posted a status update/post. Screens, details and thoughts below. Of particular note is that it has both a Web component (for desktop access) and also that it works on any S60 phone and not just Nokia devices.
One of the aims of the service is to help facilitate serendipitous meetings between friends. If you know where people are and what they're doing then it is easier to make plans together on the spur of the moment.
The application has two basic components: firstly, updating and sharing your location, and secondly sharing information and what you are doing or thinking (micro-blogging).
What's up view, viewing a friend's location and commenting on a post.
Nokia Friend View is also available via the web. You can see your friends' locations and recent status updates. It's a good example of how services can cross over between platforms to add additional value. Clearly the phone client is the only option when out and about, but the web version means you can take advantage of the bigger screen and keyboard when you are sitting at your desk.
You will need a Nokia Account in order to use the service (Nokia's new unified log-in service that includes Ovi). Friend View should work on all S60 3rd Edition phones and is available from the Nokia Beta Labs web site.
Friend View is an experimental service which has been built by the Nokia Research Centre. As such, it should be seen as a way of exploring new ideas and concepts. It is not a mature service in the same way that Nokia Maps, or even Nokia Chat, is. However, it is likely that the concepts seen in Friend View could form part of a new application or be combined into existing Nokia services. Releasing it through Beta Labs gives Nokia the opportunity to gather additional feedback from a wider group of people.
Finally here is a video, courtesy of Beta Labs, explaining the new service and showing it in action. [You might recognise AAS-friend and ex-blog-supremo Stefan, now working at Nokia in Finland, of course...]
Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:44 UTC, November 5th
Categories: Software, Links of Interest, Editorial Thoughts
Platforms: General, S60 3rd Edition
News Discussion
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.
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
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.
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....
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.
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, donīt 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
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