You socially savvy interweb users will undoubtedly love this. Let me guess, you probably have Foursquare, Gowalla, Brightkite and Facebook accounts. This means you enjoy keeping up with your circle of friends and sharing your latest adventures. One of the huge downers of having all those accounts is that you have to sign in to each one individually to update the status.
Now that we’re all on the same page, let me introduce the iPhone app Footfeed.
The app has a crazy name, but is brilliant for what it proposes to do. By definition Footfeed is a new mobile geo location check-in aggregator network that brings together many web services so users can check-in to their many networks simultaneously. Built from the ground up as a stand alone check-in service, Footfeed integrates APIs from Brightkite, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, and soon Twitter, Google Latitude and Whrrl. Footfeed features an advanced location matching algorithm that matches locations across different services so that users can check-in to multiple services with one click.
Positives
I really like the interface and the integration of the four geo location services. It’s fairly clean and allows you to quickly “Check In Now” to all of your connected accounts. You can easily add the location to your list of favorites and see very clearly how many times you’ve already checked into that location.
The profile screen has three tabs that allow you to quickly see what your recent activity has been, make adjustments to your Footfeed account and also see an aggregated listing of stats for all your connected accounts (total checkins, number of friends, number of photos shared, etc.).
What Needs Work
The integration. As the app sits at version 1.0.1, there are still issues with consistent check-ins happening on all connected accounts. I’ve used the app for about 2 weeks now and I’ve only seen successful check-ins to Foursquare and Footfeed. I know the design team is working on a next release, and they just posted on their blog that significant changes are in the works. The short list of updates coming are:
- API documentation – we will be releasing API documentation so developers can add multi checkin capabilities to their apps
- Optimized location matching – features designed to improve the ability to checkin to multiple services simultaneously, including manual selection of locations on the the different services
- Check-in from anywhere – in other words, Foursquare-style vs. Gowalla-style check-ins so you can check into any location from anywhere in the world
- Search – this will be added to www.footfeed.com shortly and will work with both people and locations
- Optimized for iOS4.0 – expect to see support for fast app switching and high-res icons
- Twitter and Google Latitude support – you’ll see me jumping up and down for joy when this comes. I’m especially becoming a fan of Google Latitude
Summary
Even with the early shortcoming of this app, there is a bright future. Once they get this next release out and fix the multi-check-in integration, this app will move to the front screen of my iPhone. Just having the ease of use and the capability to knock out all of those location sharing tools with one push of the button is worth waiting for.
Now true, there are other apps out there that provide similar functionality, like GeoLorean and the web-based app from the BriteKite team, check.in. Those tools are definitely up-and-comers in this multi-location based application space and just may surpass Footfeed, however I see more of a forward momentum with Footfeed than I have with the other two apps.
To check out the free Footfeed app, head over to the App Store.
