How To Use

Web 2.0 The Magazine

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How to use [Glympse—share your where]

Glympse Glympse™ is a way to share your location with anyone for a specified period of time. Glimpse uses a patent-pending GlympseWatch™ timer to enable you to set a duration for the time you will be at any location. With an Internet-enabled phone you select a contact, set a duration, and hit send. The receiver of the Glympse sees exactly where you are on their Internet-enabled phone or computer.

Tool Summary

> Current version is a public beta.

> As of May 22, 2008 the only Internet-enabled phone that supports sending a Glympse is the T-Mobile G1 Android.

> Next set of phones will include iPhone, Windows Mobile®, and BlackBerry®.

> Using your G1 phone, go to the Android Market, hit 'Search' and search for 'Glympse'…

Price: Free

Glympse software must be installed on your smart phone to use the application. A comprehensive user manual is below.

http://www.glympse.com/help/quick_start

Web 2.0 The Magazine tried Glympse. Johnmac sent us a Glympse on his Android. We received a message in our Gmail account that Johnmac had sent a Glympse.

Clicking on the provided link in the email, we were presented with a map showing johnmac’s location in the Bronx, NY.

http://www.glympse.com

Share Your Where

Once installed on your Android, a Glympse can be sent to a mobile phone number (the Glympse can also be sent via text message) or to an email address. You may also select recipients from your contact list.

Locations can be added to a favorites list which saves time in sending a Glympse of commonly traveled to locations. Glympses are also available through a history for reuse.

For an independent review of Glympse, see the Wall Street Journal article “Sharing Where You Are When You Care to Share” by Nick Wingfield.

A snipit follows:

There's a tendency in the Twitter era for people to share copious details of their lives with online pals. One way to do that is through new mobile-phone services that let people share their physical locations using the tracking technology inside modern cellphones.

While these location-sharing services have some interesting possibilities, they also raise some disturbing implications for privacy -- or maybe it just seems that way if, like me, you're over 35 years old. Lately I've been testing a cellphone location-sharing service that I found simple, useful and non-creepy enough that I can imagine people thirtysomething and older using it.

The free service is called Glympse, from a company of the same name that has designed it to share your location with friends and colleagues in small increments of time -- glimpses, as the name implies, of your whereabouts. Glympse just released a test version of the service as an application for the G1, a phone offered by T-mobile that runs Google's Android operating system.

The company will release versions of Glympse for BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iPhone and Nokia phones in the coming weeks. Users can download the Glympse software onto G1 phones through Android Market, the online clearinghouse for applications for Android phones.

I used Glympse on an iPhone and a G1 and, for comparison, tried out a couple of other location-sharing applications, Google Latitude and Loopt. When you start the Glympse application, it identifies where you are on a map using a combination of location technologies in cellphones, including GPS satellites, Wi-Fi hot spots and phone towers.

Your location isn't shared with others until you "send a Glympse" to someone. The software allowed me to send a Glympse with my location for selected chunks of time lasting anywhere from zero minutes to four hours. Picking zero minutes shared only my location at the moment of sending, while selecting four hours meant the recipients of my Glympse could track me for that period of time, wherever I went.

[snip]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124286030218440967.html

From Glympse website

http://glympse.com/get_glympse