A good adjunct to this morning’s post, which is now on Techmeme, is this product launch by Michael Rubin. Tonight MapOmatic became available in Apple’s iOS store. What is it? It’s a new kind of mobile app that shows you where folks have checked in around you.
Really this is a map replacement for your mobile phone. Why use that? Because it can show you where your friends and others have checked in. Why does that matter? Well, for the same reason you look into restaurant windows to see if there’s anyone else in the place. Crowds matter. Popularity matters. Friends matter.
Watch the video to see what it does and why it’s important. Then follow them on Twitter.
Now that more of us are doing things like checking in on Foursquare or taking pictures of places or Foodspotting mobile apps like this one are going to increasingly be needed.
Scobleizer 
You need to shorten these videos, Scoble >.<
Anyway, I got 12 minutes in, and stopped; it's not that impressive. It's pulling in Facebook and Foursquare check-ins, and integrating with the location field of your calendar, but the context which he speaks of, is nowhere near enough.
I'd take Foursquare Explore or the reviews you get with Google Places over this.
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Heh. Yeah, but that’s why I do these videos so you can hear his philosophy. Maybe it’ll be more useful in the future. I’ll keep watching it, I think he’s onto something.
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I totally get what he’s saying about Context, and that was one of my big takeouts from SXSW, and I wrote a little rant on that (http://c0up.posterous.com/sxsw-the-context-layer), but the vision and scope of Context that I heard there seems much grander than what MapOMatic seems about… at this point in time anyway.
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Interesting video. I’ve been building something similar outside of my day job (for iOS first, naturally) but with a greater focus on the real time/social angle that you hint at in your piece. Geotagged tweets can add great context in the best case scenarios so I’ll be shipping that day 1. Would love to send you a preview build in a few weeks.
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Should be called CrashOMatic. After the fourth try, I gave up.
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Yes, lots of server instability on the first day or two after launch. Those should be cleared up by now. Try again – i’m curious if it still crashes.
(CrashOMatic… hahaha)
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