I got out of the subway today, opened up the streetflow application on my iphone and I was instantly greeted with dozens of local suggestions for lunch. The suggestions were actually very informal but they work perfectly for my needs - cheap eats and reccomended dishes at various locations in the financial district (where pizza can go for five bucks a slice!).
Location aware services such as Streetflow are gonna become extremely popular once the iPhone 3G and 2.0 firmware come out within the next few weeks. In it’s essence, it’s a new take on social networking utilizing people and information that’s relevent to you and your location. Apple has a huge forefront in this new field with the iPhone. Not only is the technology vital, but open app development is essential to location based services that will soon hit the market. I’m expecting some great stuff in the coming weeks - we’ve already got greats in the jailbroken arena such as StreetFlow (restaurant suggestions), Twinkle (location aware twitter client), and iFlickr (geotagged pictures posted to your flickr account). Imagine knowing where all your friends are at a given time… Instead of an away message, you’ve got their location. A tad stalkerish, but like Twitter I think it could possibly break into a “niche” mainstream userbase.
So I’ll be trying food from Veronica’s today - it’s supposedly a famous Jamaican food cart down by the water with great food. Check back for more reviews on location aware services in the coming weeks!
Here’s a quick video overview of StreetFlow in action on Youtube. By the way Yelp, it’s time for you to put all that information you’ve got on local businesses to use… Develop an iPhone app!
