Windows Phone 7 App of the Week: Glympse

Posted 06/15/2011 at 1:53pm | by Tim Ferrill

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With the proliferation of modern smart phones, location based services use bleeding-edge technology to accomplish old-school problems. Mapping tools from the likes of Microsoft and Google will allow you to search for specific restaurants or businesses based on your current location while Foursquare and Facebook Places both make use of location data from your mobile phone to share places you’ve visited with your social networks. The downside to these services is the many people who have legitimate concerns about sharing their location and habits with the faceless hordes on the Internet.

Glympse is a location sharing service which protects your privacy by limiting access to only people you invite. Glympse shares your real-time location only with those you’ve invited. Invitations for Glympse also expire after a set amount of time, protecting the privacy of even the most paranoid. Tracking is done with either a web-based application or a corresponding smart phone application. If both users have Glympse on their smart phone it can even allow you to see your location in relation to your friend, making it easy to find each other in a crowd.

Glympse is a free service, and the application is available from the Windows Phone Marketplace.