Location Based Social Networking

In the beginning

You might think that social networking and sharing via mobile is something that has come about relatively recently with the ubiquity of high-speed mobile Internet and Wi-Fi networks, but phones have been sharing with each other almost since the dawn of the mobile age.

The very first type of sharing service that was widely used by mobile phone users was infrared, the same method by which TV remote controls transfer data to your TV. It was primitive and slow, but it allowed people to share files and images with each other for the first time without the need to be on a desktop or to attach the file in an email.

While this was actually pretty revolutionary, it didn't exactly set the world alight because it was still very limited as a service: It took a long time to send anything between phones with infrared, and even when it was successful, the practical limits of the service meant that it was generally limited to files smaller than a megabyte. Not a problem when your phone's internal memory is only 12 megabytes, but not exactly future proof. Thankfully, the development of Bluetooth technology brought the business of data transfer right up to date. Initially created to replace data cables for short range data transfer, it quickly became the primary method of communication between mobile devices, but it also inadvertently invented the whole concept of social sharing - almost totally by accident.

Social sharing is born

While the original Bluetooth system was much more powerful and practical as a sharing service than the old Infrared system, allowing for much larger files to be shared much faster than ever before, it was not without its limitations. The primary one being that it was only effective in a five to ten-metre radius, meaning that people who wanted to share files between phones had to gather close together and connect to each other's devices.

While this was the intention behind the technology, a side effect was that it was possible for people to connect with anybody in the vicinity that also had their Bluetooth turned on and send them data, like files and images.The Swedish telecommunications engineers who created Bluetooth probably couldn't imagine why anyone would want to do something like that, but in the hands of young people, it became a fun way to share indiscriminately early memes, news and social information with each other - and social sharing was born.

Social media quickly came and filled that gap that Bluetooth had highlighted in this way, allowing young people to share content with strangers and acquaintances in a more controlled and systemic fashion all over the world rather than just where they happened to be. But there remained a need for people to share information based purely on their location; particularly in venues like conferences, events, concerts and exhibitions, and a rash of applications were created to fill this need. By this stage, the mobile industry was well past the idea that simple data transfer was enough, so what set these different apps apart from each other was the workstream that they used to achieve this simple aim, with each app focussing on a different aspect of social sharing, from business to entertainment.

The idea spreads

It soon became clear that there were huge differences between how people wanted to use social sharing to achieve different aims, and there were even variations between different apps designed around broadly similar goals like business sharing and entertainment.

BrightKite, for example, was designed to allow people to share their location and other information like bar and restaurant reviews and files, but only between pre-determined friends. While being superficially similar, another app, CitySense, was at the other end of the spectrum and was designed to connect anyone with a mobile signal to allow users to see where people were congregating in a specific city or region. Many similar apps also existed themed around specific goals like image sharing or review sharing, but the concept was the same: sharing data with strangers based on where you were.

The location-based social network was here to stay by this point, but while there was a huge variety of ways in which to do it, the mechanism behind social sharing was still fairly simple. The app would provide you with information based on the way it was designed to work, and it was up to you to decide what to do with that information, which still left the user with a lot of work to do in order to make that information useful. Then, with the advent of big data and better machine learning, apps like Swarm, Foursquare and Zenly came on the scene to make the whole process smarter.

Social sharing gets smart

This is the cool part, where the VYBZ app comes in! While being able to see where your friends are and what they're up to is cool, it doesn't tell you a lot about the life of a city beyond what's happening right at that moment.

These new players all use different methods of archiving and learning from that data over time to establish the places that your friends and even strangers go in a city, what they do there and how they feel about it. This is an experience beyond simply finding easier ways to meet up or finding out which bar is coolest, it gives you local knowledge about a place at the tips of your fingers without having to spend years building it up yourself.

This is the primary advantage of Swarm by Foursquare, whose main USP is that history feature which lets you see both what your friends have been doing over time and what other people who use the same spaces as you have been doing too. Zenly, on the other hand, is more focussed on actually meeting other people - allowing you to see details such as where your friends are, where they're going and how they plan to get there, what their battery life is like, etc. Once again, these ideas have developed social sharing one step further and beyond the old idea of what it could do, but they're still limited in scope: Why should an app like that just tell you what you already know, connect you to people you've already met or bring you closer to places you've already been?

The VYBZ difference

VYBZ takes the basis of social sharing and makes it part of your world, not just another add-on to make your life easier. It's a fact nowadays that everywhere has a digital life beyond the day to day physical life of a place, and VYBZ helps you tap into that directly, not just look at a ghost of it from days or weeks ago. VYBZ space feed functionality gives everywhere a history and life of its own, showing you posts and check ins from all the people who have been in a place like a bar or a restaurant or library: What they got up to, how they felt about it, who they met. Not only does this give you more of an insight into a place, what goes on there and whether you might like to be a part of it, but it also allows you to connect with others who have been there or are there right now. It is a kind of virtual ice breaker, if you take a look at their tabloid and like what you see, and discovering venue-specific content to help the conversation flow.

We all have a kind of virtual second life through our social media interactions, but using other apps has left this life still sadly disconnected to our day to day. Using VYBZ adds a second digital layer to anywhere you happen to be, and allows you to turn your virtual interactions physical in an instant by meeting the people that you've been talking to online. This helps you meet new people, have good times and even find love much more easily, by seamlessly integrating your digital life into your physical one. We also take your digital health and your privacy very seriously, and we've progressed way beyond the time of dropping people unwanted Bluetooth messages.

VYBZ filters all messages to make sure that they don't contain inappropriate images or nudity, and people can't progress messages into a full-blown chat feed if the receiving party hasn't replied to the first message - so there are no unwanted or intrusive interactions. We also have strict community guidelines and a robust reporting and restricting facility, so bad users are quickly banned so they can't disrupt your enjoyment of VYBZ. As a result, we're totally community-led, and we don't take a top-down approach that decides for you how your VYBZ experience should be. We love it when our users find cool and interesting ways to use our platform, and we'll always make it as open as possible so you don't feel restricted. We think that VYBZ is the future of social interaction on mobile, and we'd love to welcome you onto our platform so you can get socialising and join our digital tribe.