Roger Binns — Sun 20 April 2014
An app I have been using for several years is Glympse. It is very close to perfection.
It lets people know where you are. A common example is if you are
meeting someone somewhere they can monitor your progress and estimated
time of arrival. This is especially useful while driving.
Where Glympse gets things right is how smooth they make it. Unlike
most other apps, absolutely no authentication, account creation,
social media profiles or privacy invasion is required. That applies
to both the sender and the recipients. Glympses automatically timeout
(your choice of up to 4 hours, or on reaching your destination).
The Glympses themselves are a URL in the form
glympse.com/123A-BCD4 which is sent to the recipients. Providing
they can access the web, they can see details. You are tracked on a
moving map, along with updated ETA, speed (if you chose to share it),
traffic and track. Recipients on mobile devices can use the Glympse
mobile app to track multiple people at once etc, but this is not
required.
Gympses can be sent in whatever methods you have made available. For
example SMS can be used on mobile, Twitter if you logged in, email
etc - all at once.
The pervasive feeling throughout is an app on your side. Every
potential source of friction has been removed, for both senders and
recipients. You don't feel like a pawn in some ecosystem or social
network war. This stuff just works, and works well. Recommended.
Category: misc
– Tags:
recommendation
