Is There An App For That?
I don’t have an iPhone, although I’m very intrigued by them and all of their capabilities. I do, however, have a Blackberry. Between, Twitter, Foursquare and GoWalla, I am fairly “connected” in real time to the outside world. The United States has roughly 300 million people living here, and only a small fraction (5-6 million) are registered Twitter users, with just a fraction of that being on Foursquare and GoWalla.
For those who don’t know, Foursquare and GoWalla use GPS to determine your location and let users accumulate points and such through check-ins at registered venues. This is a great idea if you have a solid network of people that are your “friends” on such networks. For example, its Friday afternoon and you want to know where your friends are for happy hour. Rather than call 7 of them, see where they’ve all checked in to and just meet them there. That 4 seconds just saved you 7 phone calls or 7 text messages or 7 emails.
Well, how about this? Say a restaurant has a capacity of 200 people, and Foursquare tells you that there are 3 people checked in there on a Friday night. How are you supposed to know if there are actually 197 more people eating there, another 40 outside waiting, or if there are just 100 people there and you could be seated immediately. Sure, you could call the place and ask, but what if you’re looking at a number of different places? Or they don’t pick up the phone (standard on Friday)?
This is where a new app would be nice, or businesses use the existing services to better connect with customers. I “follow” a number of bars and restaurants on Twitter and am connected to a few on Foursquare. All we ever see from them are specials, promotions, features, etc. How about posting an update on wait times? Or the ability to tweet a reservation, or the equivalent? An app detailing a business’s status in real time would be great. How many times have we all walked up to the door of a bar, restaurant, store (Apple!) etc. only to find it absolutely slammed?
I bring this whole thing up because I dreamt of an app that used real time satellite video streamed to my phone. In my dream I was deciding between going to Hub 51, Rockit, Bull and Bear, and English one random summer night. I pulled each of their locations up on my satellite video app and decided that Rockit had no line to wait in. It was a pretty great dream, and got me thinking about why this is isn’t developed yet.