Fresh out of Nokia Beta Labs comes Friend View, an experimental location and micro-blogging service which works both on mobile phones as well as on the web.
To show your location, the Friend View application is using the built-in GPS or the network if there is no signal available (you can also set your location manually). When you turn on Friend View, it locates you as an avatar on a map and shows you all your friends as well. Whenever you send a micro-message, it appears as a word balloon on the map, and you can get a quick overview of what’s going on with your friends with the ‘What’s Up’ feature.
Stefan Constantinescu from Nokia Corporate Strategy shares more about the new feature, which is currently in development:
Our friends over at ArcticStartup reviewed the software and were left unimpressed:
I’m not blown away, nor have I completely lost hope with Nokia. They are trying fairly hard. The service is very Nokia-like in that it’s not very user friendly compared to some others that have emerged from the west coast of US. The UI is rather ugly and after you start using it feels that someone has designed it on paper, but never really used it herself as it’s not logical all the way through. Similarly the service is still very buggy, not loading the map on the web browser, eating one’s battery in no time …the list goes on and has still some really retarded features like the fact that the nick name is case sensitive.
AllAboutSymbian also wrote up a review and has more screenshots.
At first, we thought this had something to do with Nokia’s acquisition of location-based service Plazes earlier this year, but peculiarly the Plazes team released a mobile version of their own just yesterday which looks like an entirely different thing than Friend View.
Maybe the two teams should talk to one another. I hear Nokia has this new app in development called Friend View that lets you keep up with what your friends are doing.