Posted on Monday, 1st September 2008 by David Edgeworth
Location-based social networking is, in the eyes of many, the next big thing the Internet is going to offer. We all should be used to the concept of networking by now, with many of us being members of Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, or maybe all three. We’ve all been able to keep in touch with friends much more easily with these amazing sites, and have been able to connect with old ones whom we haven’t even heard of for 15 years or more. But these social networks have one thing missing: they don’t know where you are.
Enter ZKOUT. This is one of several embryonic social networks that will allow you to connect with others, send messages, share pictures and videos, together with telling it your exact location, and sharing it with your friends. Gone is the day when your friends haven’t a clue where you are, gone is the day when you may have been in one coffee shop in town and your long-lost friend may have been in the one next door. At least that’s the theory. The question as to whether the masses will actually want their friends to know where they are every minute of the day, still has to be answered.
ZKOUT, like many of its competitors, is still in beta, and doesn’t have many members yet. But that hasn’t stopped me giving it a try. The features that are available so far are great, the interface is fairly easy to use, there is a Facebook app so you can broadcast your photos and location to your Facebook friends, and there is a good mobile version of the site. Best of all, though, is the automatic integration with Yahoo’s new location broker service, Fire Eagle. If you change your location with any application that supports Fire Eagle, ZKOUT will pick it up without you having to do anything. This is something that its nearest competitors, Brightkite, Plazes and Rummble, have yet to offer. Brightkite and Plazes are not yet able to get your location from Fire Eagle at all, they can only send it, and with Rummble you still have to log into the site and manually click on a link to get your location. Kind of defeats the whole objective that Fire Eagle is trying to achieve. I daresay this will change, especially as Nokia has now taken ownership of Plazes, but at the present ZKOUT is out in front.
One thing that is going to be very important in this new generation of social networks is privacy. There must be an option to go ‘off the radar’ if you wish, so for that ZKOUT has is privacy mode. If you don’t want to be seen by any Tom, Dick or Harry, you can just click ‘Go Private.’ This will instantly make your profile, including your photos, and videos, only visible to your friends. Your location will be set according to your privacy settings - whether that’s no-one, or just your friends.
On your ZKOUT home page, you are presented with a news feed, on what you and your friends have been up to, much like on Facebook. You also have an Explore tab, which will give you a Google map of your ‘local’ area (for me that’s the entire southern half of the UK, from Cornwall to North Yorkshire, a distance of about 400 miles!). Your location is shown as a red cross, and other users are shown with thumbnail versions of their profile pictures, at their given location. Where photos or videos (called ‘moments’) have been shared, they are shown as blue ‘dartboard’ icons at the location where they were tagged. The interface is very slick; hover your mouse over a moment and the icon will enlarge; click on it and you will be taken straight to it, in another tab. Click on a user’s profile and you will be able to view their details, and location if it is set to public, or click on the lower-right part of the picture and it will open a chat client. If that’s not enough, there is a ‘local news’ tab on the right which shows what everyone on your map has been doing lately, and the ‘pictures and videos’ tab will show recently shared moments. Run your mouse over them, and the icon on the map will pop up so you can instantly see where they were taken.
All this sounds pretty good? Well there’s more. ZKOUT has a mobile version of the site which allows you to do most of the things you can on the main site, like set your location and upload moments. The only thing it can’t do is get your location from a GPS receiver, but Fire Eagle takes care of that. If I update my location using Fire Eagle’s updater on my Nokia N95, Zkout will pick it up without me having to lift a finger.
The icing on the cake is the extensive integration with Facebook. The developers of ZKOUT realise that most of their users are not going to be able to get their friends to sign up too, at least not for now, so their Facebook app allows them to see what they are doing until they do. Upload a picture to ZKOUT and it will also add it to a special ZKOUT album on Facebook. Add a note and it will change your status, together with your location. A small box on your profile screen will show your current location and recent photos. So it’s all good stuff!
But does it work? Remember ZKOUT is still in beta, so it is not devoid of problems. At present I have found problems with it getting the incorrect location from Fire Eagle, sometimes placing me in a location up to 25 miles away from where Fire Eagle reports that I am. I have also found that it does not always show the city in which I am located in Facebook, just saying that I am in ‘GB.’ Well, Great Britain is a big place, so that doesn’t really narrow it down! But these are relatively minor problems that I’m sure will be ironed out before long.
All told, ZKOUT promises to be a great social network, which at the moment, has every chance of being successful. At present, the competition between sites like this is wide open, and at present, I would say ZKOUT is probably one of the leaders in the race at the moment.
Tags: social network, zkout
Posted in Social Networking, Website Review | Comments (1)
September 18th, 2008 at 5:28 am
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