Did any of you try Nokia Friend View?

It's a hot mixture of micro-blogging and location based service for S60 phones.... And something that should have been done before, by someone else, as an open project using open standards.

It's what I always wanted to have, but I know I will not use it because it only works with S60 phones and the few people I know who would be interested in such a toy do not have S60 phones.

If there was the same thing as free software, built on open standards, they would use it via laptop or other phones and it would be much easier to build a community around it.

Pity.

Nokia spoiled it again with their walled garden attitude. (Same with Nokia Chat... I really don't understand their strategy.)

Yes, I did.

Best comment ever. Restricting a community to a series of devices is so 1980s!

Actually there's web access...

Web access that works neither in MSIE nor in microb. - Also, the web access doesn't support the most important part: location. The web application doesn't see where I am.

Anyway, such things wouldn't work as web applications. What's needed is an open framework that lets people choose among several clients and providers. Like POP/SMTP makes email a winner, hotmail alone would have died.

In fact, probably most of what would be needed to copy Friendview's functionality is out there... That's why it's such a pity that nobody did it before in a way that could be easily ported to a GPS-device like the N810... And in a way that would allow me to actually use it with the people I know. (Come on, how many of your friends have compatible S60-phones?)

Funny, I've used the site in MSIE...

Wait, this is a beta release of an application running on S60 + web. Thre is a limited number of S60 devices officially supported, but I guess nothing would stop other manufacturers of S60 devices to do the adaptation/contracts needed. 'Not limiting to devices' means in practice to port the app to Maemo, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Android, etc... or make the web support work in a way that the browsers and location frameworks of those devices can support the functionality.

By the way, Nokia acquired Trolltech and is pushing the cross-platform Qt (and other cross-platform technologies) precisely to address this problem.

http://betalabs.nokia.com is not that different to a garage.maemo.org for Nokia research and young projects. http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/friendview offers feedback channels in the form of comment and email to the developers. I sent them an email this week and they answered pretty fast.

Have you tried sharing your questions, concerns and views there? Pointing also there to the thread here? I'm sure they are interested to know.

By the way, I'm qgil at ovi and I also want to give a try to this. Invitations are welcome.

Carman provides a way to see where your friends are via pigin ...

Yes. I use their blog+mail to give feedback; their applications are sexy and I have quite a few of them installed on my 6110 Navigator.

My impression is that the people who work on these projects are trapped in some 20th century corporate strategy that they know is dated and wrong, but need to follow anyway because that's what the management decided.

The same topic was discussed over at the Beta blog when they first released Nokia Chat: There's no technical reason why I shouldn't be able to use this without registering at ovi; there's no technical reason why it shouldn't just work with any existing XMPP-account I already have. The Beta Labs people refuse to comment on this particular issue in public, but I think it's plain to see some suit-and-tie zombie at Nokia actually and honestly believes they could push sales by restricting the use of these good ideas to a walled garden that's under Nokia's control: ovi.com here, S60 there,... The point they're missing, though, is that these community services need at least two people to be useful and fun. So what happens is that each of us tries it, admires the nice idea, finds out there's nobody out there who has the reqired technical equipment (phone, data plan,...) and therefore stops using it again. (It's absurd to assume people will buy S60-phones and register at ovi.com only to because of friendview.)

What would be the better strategy?

Use existing, open standards to build a great service; make great software for people to use it. Then go and beat the competition by how you do it, not what you do. And use the fact that you created the service in the first place for marketing.

Thanx for accepting mine... I can see where you are! I'm lovin' it. This is fun. Go post some messages... And upload an avatar!