There is a new social network in town and it’s different from anything that has come before it. ”Tagwhat“ fuses mobile and location-based social networking services creating an innovative augmented reality experience. After downloading the Tagwhat app, consumers with an Android (and soon, an iPhone) can simply hold up their mobile phone while in camera view and see geo-contextual tags from pre-selected friends and community members. You can also view the Tagwhat as an overhead map (provided by Google Maps) with pins representing places that other members have tagged or commented on.
Each location serves as
an interactive social object. By just pointing a mobile phone at the desired restaurant or hot spot, information such as direct links to email, phone, SMS, photos, URL’s, cross-posting to Twitter or Facebook would automaticly pop up on the screen! You will also be able to view public tags and comments from all members of the network. If you are looking for a bit of privacy, you can opt to only see notes and comments from friends.
By “checking in” to a location, you are able to tag almost anything, including pictures, blog posts and any other digital content. You can also follow businesses and friends in a “Twitter-like” fashion. Users can follow friends and other community members or branch outside of their existing network and search for specific users or content by keywords. This could be a goldmine for businesses. It will create a new way to offer promotions and deals to their “followers.”
So what are your thoughts? Amazing or too extreme? I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems pretty impressive. In theory it sounds great, what if all the comments on your business are negative? It makes sharing a bad review of a restaurant so much easier than before. Instead of calling up your friends to complain, just write a bad review in the form of a tag so that EVERYONE can see. Talk about an increase in word-of-mouth. It is still new, but it’s going to be interesting to see if Tagwhat picks up speed in the near future.
This sounds cool and scary at the same time. Do you know if this is similar to Foursquare? Foursquare has similar features and from what I’ve heard Facebook is adding geotagging features also.
Keith
I think that it has a lot of Foursquare like features. One source calls Tagwhat “Foursquare on steroids.” I just read an article from AdAge that said Facebook will be launching a location-base function to their site as soon as this month! I think this is really going to do a lot for mobile marketing in the near future. Thanks for the comments!
-Whitney