Loopt is releasing version 4.0 of its location-based iPhone app today. The update comes with a refreshed design and feature set that aims to better help users find friends and places.
Most notably, the new Loopt is said to use a social filter for places. The application marries information on you with data on where your Loopt and Facebook friends have been to show places of social relevance.
Also included is an “inner circle” option you can use to select friends to automatically share your location with. This feature is like the Loopt of yore, meaning it provides you with implicit location-sharing options so you can always share your whereabouts with a set group of friends without needing to check in to locations.
Other updates include the ability to send location-based text messages via the Loopt Ping feature and checkin rewards as sourced from Loopt Star, which has been merged into the new Loopt app.
“We continue to work at surfacing interesting information that makes Loopt like x-ray vision,” says co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, “where you can see through city walls and find something compelling, whether it’s being alerted that an old friend is nearby, or that there’s a café around the corner frequented by friends.”
The current update is for iPhone only (and doesn’t appear to be live just yet), but the company is said to be releasing a similar version for Android in the next few weeks. We’ve yet to try it out, but the inner circle, places filtered by social relevance and new Ping features all sound quite promising and help to further differentiate the service from the likes of Foursquare and Facebook Places.
More About: iphone app, location sharing, loopt
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