With all the debates surrounding Apple’s use of location tracking data, it’s not surprise that apps based on the opposite concept have started showing up on the web and App Store: whilst the blogosphere made a big deal out of a software bug in iOS that left a cache of cellular points unencrypted on a computer, some people thought from the beginning of this latest Apple brouhaha that having visual access to your location in history, on a map was a cool thing. That’s why the NYT Lab department itself created a web tool to donate and visualize location data: if you have nothing to hide and you don’t mind sharing your location history, seeing stuff on a map is neat. Some even say it reminds us of the power of mobile technology nowadays. Footprints, a new app for iPhone and iPad, takes this idea a step further and allows you to constantly monitor the real-time location of your friends, family members and employees legally, with an app, all the time, with a few taps.

Footprints has got an interesting pricing scheme: it’s free for two months, but you can purchase a subscription for 3 months ($0.99), one year ($2.99) or two years ($4.99). If you download the app now, create an account and then purchase a three-month subscription, those three months will add on top of the two months you already have for free. Very cool. So how does it work? You basically can create an account to be tracked in real-time, and share your location with your friends and family. Similarly, people can share their location with you, choosing an expiration time for sharing and the maximum number of “waypoints” to display. Footprints relies on Apple’s GPS tracking implementation, and for this reason it comes with several settings to tweak the behavior of background tracking in order to make sure battery won’t die in 2 hours. The developers explain the app uses Apple’s “Significant Location Change” technology to determine location changes and waypoints, which are typically logged after a change “of 500 meters to 3 km or a quarter-mile to 2 miles”, depending on cellular network coverage. In the Settings, however, you can customize the location tracking method even deeper: if you don’t want to use cellular triangulation, you can turn on GPS pulse every 10 minutes, or every 5 minutes. Of course, the more frequently a GPS call occurs, the faster your battery will drain. But there’s more: you can specify a “sufficient accuracy” in locating your position, auto-sensing and “minimum movement.”

The app’s got Facebook check-in integration and parental controls with passcode, but what struck me as incredibly easy is the way you can share your location with people you know and trust. In the settings, all you have to do is pick a contact from your Address Book, and choose to share your location with him / her. Provided this person is using Footprints with the same phone number and email address you have in your Address Book, he or she will be able to see your position based on the sharing settings you chose. In the main screen of the app (a map), you’ll be able to switch between your location (marked by a Me tab) and others’ (the Friends tab). That’s it. As these people move and go places, you’ll see them on your device with the waypoints and information they chose to share. It’s remarkably user-friendly, private, and, overall, simply well done.

Footprints is free, features iTunes in-app purchases and adopts the “it just works” philosophy for two important subjects nowadays like location tracking and privacy. Give it a try.

Released yesterday for free in the App Store, Showyou is a new universal app aimed at letting you discover videos shared by your friends on Twitter and Facebook, and share these findings yourself in your social graph. Unlike Squrl — which we reviewed yesterday as well — Showyou isn’t a service meant for curating videos in collections and grab them from a web browser through a bookmarklet: rather, it’s a very simple app that wants to offer a better way to browse videos found on Twitter and Facebook with the “Showyou Grid” — a 2D video wall that you can pan horizontally and vertically, very similar to what we’ve already seen in the Aweditorium iPad app.

Once logged in with Twitter or Facebook, Showyou will find friends that are already using the app and it gives you the option to “follow them”. The more people you follow, the more videos you get and the more populated the Grid becomes. By default it shows nearly 1,000 videos — many of those collected from Showyou’s system, so it really depends on how many people you start following and how much content they decide to share publicly. But there’s no doubt Showyou works best the moment you start following people and engaging with the service itself, as it also showcases “featured users” the developers recommend you follow to get interesting videos. The video wall was quite responsive yesterday when I first installed the app, but I’m noticing some slow loading times today — presumably a lot of people gave Showyou a try (again, it’s free) and the servers are getting hammered under heavy traffic. When videos load, however, not only you get a beautiful presentation with big thumbnails and an elegant Futura font — you can tap on each video to view it in a bigger popup window overlaying the main grid, share it or leave a comment. You can also tell a user you liked a video he shared by “thanking” him. If you don’t like the Grid view, you can switch to a cleaner list that shows you videos one after the other.

Overall, Showyou it’s a really simple app that gets one thing done extremely well: collecting videos shared by your friends. It’s not as full-featured as Squrl when it comes to exploring the Internet hunting for cool videos to curate (I mean, they’re two deeply different products), but if you’re looking for an easy way to see what your friends are watching you should take Showyou for a spin.

Over the past months we’ve followed closely the development of Friends, an iPhone app by Taptivate that aims at changing the way you stay in touch with your friends on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Version 1.0 was released in December, and the developers quickly iterated with version 1.5 released in February adding Read It Later support and improved notifications.

Friends 1.6, released a few minutes ago, is another major update to the app that introduces redesigned sections, powerful search functionalities and completely revamped Facebook support. Friends can now upload photos to Facebook, and users can also comment on photos posted on Facebook. This kind of integration with the service was highly requested in the previous versions, and works just as advertised. Furthermore, the app is now capable of searching for friends across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn — again, a welcome addition that uses a beautiful toolbar running along the top of the app.

Every post comes with its own timestamp in version 1.6, and every post can also be retweeted at any time from within the timeline. The interface has been refined and looks more gorgeous than ever; I also noticed syncing times seem to be improved with this latest update.

Last, Friends is on sale at $0.99 in the App Store. Go get it now, as it’s an amazing deal for a great iPhone app. More screenshots below. (more…)

Friends, the “social contact manager” by Taptivate we reviewed a few months ago, was updated today to version 1.5, which includes a number of highly requested features from users and several optimizations and design improvements to make the app faster and easier to use. Friends, in case you haven’t heard, is an app that aggregates contacts from your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts and matches them with your existing Address Book to allow you to always stay in touch with your friends, and find who’s online instantly. The app can serve as a Twitter client and Facebook application, also allowing you to place calls through a custom dialpad UI and organize your contacts in groups and favorites. Friends, overall, is an app built on top of various social networks that’s compatible with your iPhone’s Address Book and doubles as a lightweight client.

The 1.5 update lets you view all your Facebook and Twitter notifications in the main menu — something that was among the top requests from users and that now simplifies the way you can be notified of your friends’ activity in a single place. To streamline the experience, some parts of the UI have been redesigned and a new “mode switcher” in the top toolbar lets you easily navigate across the multiple sections of the app.

Other features in Friends 1.5 include Read It Later support, sync for LinkedIn contacts and “sort by first name”. Lots of bugs have been fixed and the underlying engine improved to be faster and more reliable. Friends is available at $0.99 in the App Store.

How do you keep contacts from your local iPhone address book, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social networks in one single, unified place? That’s the question Taptivate aims at answering with its latest app for the iPhone — the much anticipated Friends.

In the era of social networking, social graphs and Twitter trends, it’s not easy to keep up with the stream of information. We all know that. But at a wider level, it’s not simple to keep up with the people behind those information, either. Sometimes, we struggle to find a person’s contact details because we don’t know where to look. The iPhone’s address book is a thing of its own, even if Apple managed to deploy sync for contacts in MobileMe. Sync alone, however, doesn’t come to the rescue when it’s about integration with all the social services we’re subscribed to. Nor do giants like Facebook and Google help, continuously fighting with each other over contact exports and proper email access.

If most of our social connections happen online nowadays, what’s the best way to make the pieces come together in a single package? According to Taptivate, that would be an iPhone app. Friends is a beautiful contact manager and aggregator for iPhone, an app that picks contacts from your local address book and integrates them with the online services you use on a daily basis. (more…)

We’ve been keeping an eye on Taptivate’s Friends (nèe Contacts+) for a few months. When I was shown a first preview of the app, I saw a rock-solid app for iPhone capable of aggregating all your contacts from Facebook and Twitter in a single interface. It looks like the guys at Taptivate have been working hard on making the app even better, and basing on the trailer that was posted earlier today it seems like we definitely have to wait for the app to show up in the App Store.

The trailer shows us that the app will be able to pull contacts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace and your iPhone’s Address Book. You’ll also be able to check on links and photos posted by your friends, call them using a built-in dialpad, send updates to multiple social networks at once.

Check out the video below. We look forward to see if Friends by Taptivate will manage to reinvent our iPhone contacts. We sure hope so.