City Sense – social media, GPS enabled phone app.

LBS (Location Based Services) are relatively untapped at the moment but nice to see some interesting social LBS apps appearing. CitySense (here) have an app showing you where to go based on density of activity in San Francisco. It’s not the first, there have been a few – loopt.com have been offering social GPS tools for a while and even Optus had their GPS friend finder app (which unfortunately was a rip off charging >50c to show you the location of a mate).

Now that data plans are looking healthier and there are more phones with GPS, all we really need is better batteries – we all know GPS sucks the juice big time making these apps on your phone a little painful to have running. Alternatively it would be easier for us all if telcos could offer triangulated GPRS data to third parties. Yes, I know… privacy issues but nothing that couldn’t be overcome through permission based apps. IMO proprietary systems like CitySense will probably see limited success until the telcos finally switch onto the need and wide ranging consumer potential for LBS.

Credit to Jon Moss (Appleofmyi) for his post (here) on Citysense. Thanks Jon!