Bliin in action

This week much has been made of Google’s new Latitude service that allows you to share your current location with your Gmail contacts using the latest version of Google Maps For Mobile. While there has been a lot of hype (such as ReadWriteWeb’s piece here) it’s a simple but useful service that probably won’t gain great traction for a while as many people are concerned about  the privacy implications of sharing their location online. I’ve looked at location-based services from Nokia here recently but did you know that there’s something way ahead of Google and Nokia’s efforts? You can sign up and use it today and yet very few people ever mention it.

Bliin is a Dutch service that combines the location sharing of Latitude with the journey recording and media sharing of Nokia viNe. It’s available across a wide range  of mobile platforms including S60 and the iPhone. Where Bliin really shines is the way you can explore the world map, zooming in and out, looking at geotagged photographs, last recorded locations of registered users and… get this… the live movements of anyone currently sharing their journeys! You can actually watch people move around on the map!

While Google Latitude and Nokia Sports Tracker/ viNe offer live sharing of journeys, that’s on a user-by-user basis. With Bliin you get to see a living world of people sharing their journeys in real time on the same map. At the moment, aside from snooping on other users and recording your journeys on the map that’s all that there is to Bliin but the potential of the service is immense. Location-based gaming on Bliin would be amazing, for example.

Despite this potential, Bliin has currently quite a small community of users. This morning I appeared to be the only person using the service in the whole UK. So, why is no-one talking about Bliin? Well, they’re a small European company for a start. If they were based in Silicon Valley they’d  get a lot more attention simply thanks to the community they’d be part of. Then there’s money; while they do have funding, it’s nothing compared to the financial might of Google or their fellow Europeans at Nokia.

It’s clear that Bliin have some work to do. Even if they grabbed the attention of Techcrunch and other important tech blogs the service lacks the integration with your address book that Google and Nokia have at the core of their offerings. It may be cool to watch people moving around on a map in real time but unless you know them where’s the context? It’s much more useful and fun looking at people’s locations on Google Latitude because they’re people in my address book. Why do I care that some unknown person is walking round some foreign city?

The true potential in Bliin, then, may not be in social networking. The big boys already know who your friends are and sticking them on a map is child’s play.  No, Bliin with its multiuser ‘birdseye view’ on the lives of its users could have a future in corporate applications. It could offer itself as a white label solution for a wide range of solutions from real-time gaming to scientific studies of peoples’ movements.

Alternatively, Google could buy Bliin and integrate the service into Google Maps. That would be a brilliant solution, although based on Google’s track record with services like Jaiku and Feedburner they would probably just let the service rot away, unloved, if they did buy it.

If you’re interested in location services you really should give Bliin a try, if only for the perverse pleasure  of tracking strangers in the street. Now, if only this thing had a live camera!