theregoesdave

Livecontacts is a mobile buddy finder service for your cell phone that lets you keep up with friends on the go. It’s available for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones and is starting to get some buzz around the blogosphere. Local DC Social Media Expert Shashi Bellamkonda did a review in context of location-based services in the overall social media landscape.

The concept behind Livecontacts is the ability to upload your location and share it with your friends on the service. It runs in the background and can upload your location from a bluetooth or onboard gps or using cell tower triangulation. Cell location isn’t exactly easy to implement and until all cell phones have onboard gps that you can access, it’s really a necessary function in my opinion.

You just add other buddies on their web interface and you can check out a map of their locations and when they last updated. Check out this screenshot of their web desktop map- it’s pretty sweet:

This is similar to other services such as Navizon or Mologogo, except somewhat limited. Currently you can’t see your location or your friends’ locations on your mobile phone, but that’s a feature that they’re working on. Navizon also allows you to access your location via XML or FireEagle which is helpful for integrating with other services and social networks like Plazes or Dopplr.

Another function that I would like to see is messaging between users. Most of the services don’t provide a very good way to communicate. Loopt integrates location with your AIM, but only for Sprint/Nextel and Boost subscribers. This would be really helpful in turning it from a tool into a communication platform.

Here are some Livecontacts screenshots from my Windows Mobile phone. The first one shows my Today screen with the Livecontacts minimized in the task bar.

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