Friend Finder Round up

Thanks to cool apps like Twitter and Friend Feed we no longer need to start conversations with "What are you doing?" A simple look at their updates and you can start the conversation with “Did you like the concert” or “How did the meeting go”. What about starting the conversation with “Where are you”? Well, thanks to a whole plethora of friend finding apps, this can be addressed too. These applications use your location to update your friends where you are making it easier to grab lunch with someone or invite local friends to your party.

Read on after the break for a few for Windows Mobile you might be interested in, plus our pick for the best one right now (hint: that's not saying much).

Mologogo is a friend finding app that will work on your GPS enabled Windows Mobile phone. With Mologogo you can let your friends know where your at or find out where they are with a couple of clicks. Beyond that, you can post your location to Twitter and also check local traffic and weather.

Another helpful friend finder is GPS friend. For the most part it does what Mologogo does but sets its self apart by its ease of use. Two clicks and you can find out where your friends are or send your location. GPS friend work with or withought GPS. In order to start sharing locations both parties must have GPS friend installed. Let u know how that goes with your 500 contacts.

If you’re an avid texter like me then you might want to check out VITO find me. This app allows your friends to immediately find your whereabouts just by sending an SMS. You simply send your friend a codeword text and within seconds you will be notified of their coordinates. Pretty good app if you're always by a computer or have copy past to paste the coordinates into Google maps. Code words, location tracking, man the stalkers are going to love this one.

Moot is another up and comer looking to make it easier to up date your location. Moot is a mobile social software that wants to bring you together with local Mooters. It lets you share photos images and even chat. Moot creates clusters of small Moot networks, where the users discover each other when they are connected to the same WIFI hotspot.

One more, one which happens to be one of our faves here at WMExperts (when we, you know, actually use these things): Find Me for Facebook, which is nice because it auto-updates your Facebook profile, meaning all the work of trying to figure out which friends get access to your location is pretty much already set up for you. Of all of these, it gets the closest to solving the problem we describe below (because of the Facebook bit), but it's not perfect either.

(Let's just leave all the privacy issues aside and trust these apps to only broadcast our location when we ask them to.)

I think this is all fine and dandy but the problem I see is pretty much encapsulated above: too many damn FindMe-type apps and no clear winner. We really don’t want to have to worry if our friends are Mooters or Loopters. There's also the ease-of-use hassle. First you have to download the app, figure out how to use it, then make sure all your friends have the same app or it wount work. This could be a real pain in the but when your trying to track all your friends. What we need is one big mammoth friend finder. Something that is easy to use and everyone knows about.

Ideally, Twitter would team up with some of these companies and create a standard sytem of friend finding that’s a little easier. No downloading, no secret codes, just simple tweet and boom: We know who's nearby (assuming, of course, they want us to).