Loopt’s branding challenge
Been trying Loopt with my iPhone. This is a service that lets you share your physical location with friends quickly, along with a little status update like “getting tanked.”
I’ve told a couple of people about Loopt, and said something like “You should try Loopt, it lets people see each other’s location.”
This does not go over. A mildly indignant, “so, other people can track you?!” is invariably the response.
Loopt has a serious branding issue, and I don’t think they have it yet. Right now their tagline is “Your Social Compass,” but I don’t really know what that means. Typically on the web, “compass” is used metaphorically, so that throws me off. Even in meatspace, a compass is used for navigation, and we have Google Maps for that, we don’t need an actual compass to find other people.
The wording I’ve settled on is that it lets you “share your location,” which makes it relatively clear that the user is in control of when and to whom her location is published. So far the reception to this (NB: sample size of 2) has been much warmer.
I think if GPS services are going to do well, they need to really make it clear that users control the data that goes out there, not some server, service, or other people. There are a handful of individuals who think it’s great that they can publish their location to the web all the time, but the masses overwhelmingly don’t want this. If the developers of location-based apps fall into that former category, they need to work hard to remember their target audience only partially shares their enthusiasm.
(As a side note: for location-based apps to really take off, they need to be able to passively monitor users’ locations, which they currently can’t on the iPhone - no background apps allowed. This is a pretty killer setback, IMHO.)
