As I’m going to be part of the Nseries Urbanista, I was recently looking into different ways of informing my readers of my whereabouts. A reader informed me about this cool service called Bliin, a type of real-time location-aware social network. It basically allows you to follow other Bliin users in real-time as they move around, provided that they have the software running in the background on their cellphone or laptop. The mobile Bliin application is a Java-based app and honestly I hope that they come with a native Symbian S60 3rd edition app soon, but for a Java app it works pretty well. The idea is that you can be at a certain spot of interest or you just want to let others know that you’ve been there, you would than share pictures, videos, sounds etc and tag it with the appropriate info. This way you can see who’s been in the area and what they have been doing. It also allows you to create “trips” which uses the GPS data to record a certain route and again tag it with the appropriate info. A real-world scenario would be that the native people of a vacation spot would use Bliin to record the route they take to reach a secluded beach and tourist could than look this up using the PC Bliin and follow the same route. The pocket Bliin also helps you to see who’s in the area. While using the software I did notice however that some features aren’t ready yet, but this ofcourse has to do with the fact that the software is still in BETA.
If a user doesn’t really want to let other knows of his or her location, they could just create an account and login into it,watch others move around and end enjoy the sights and sounds. The web based interface uses Google Maps to shows others as they move around. There’s also a mobile web interface and a PC app.
Bliin looks quite promising and it should be interesting to see how it will all work once more users join the network and more features become available. Again I do hope they are working on a native Symbian S60 app.
Go to the Bliin website and get your own account and software and let me know what you think.
I downloaded this the other day and I had my dad and my best friend do the same this app is really pretty neat and wat it will do is pretty cool too
hi and thank your for your article. it may interest you to know – if you want your readers to follow your whereabouts – that you can add a bliin widget into this blog that shows your actual location. have a look how http://nokiageek.com/ is using it … You can create your own widget at: http://bliin.com/util/create_widget.html I hope it’s usefull.
and agreed, we definitely need to make a native Symbian version of POCKETbliin.
regards
bliin team