Up until now Loopt has always confined its iPhone users to connecting with those they already know, and while I love the service I’ve always considered that to be a huge limitation.  However, the company has now launched Loopt Mix which eliminates this pesky problem altogether.  The opt-in service lets you see Loopt user profiles of those you don’t know in your area, and without revealing their exact location or name, enables you to contact them and potentially meet new people.  To make things more relevant, Loopt Mix also enables you to search nearby users by interests, tags, or shared communities like those of TechCrunch or RockTheVote.

Sounds pretty cool, eh?  Loopt Mix is available for free in the United States, and is accessible either from your iPhone’s App Store or www.itunes.com/appstore/.

via lbszone

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Not only is Loopt a provider of one of the most popular social mapping applications in the mobile universe, the mobile social networking company seems to know how to map their way across industry borders as well.  This time Loopt has come together with NonStop Riot, a music marketing agency, to let users follow their favorite bands as they tour across the United States.

Dubbed “Follow The Music”, Loopt’s new feature lets fans of bands such as Shwayze, Chromeo, 3oh!3, The Submarines, The Secret Handshake, A Cursive Memory, Meiko, Valencia, The Medic Droid, and Bayside act as distant groupies using their mobile phones.  Fans will be able to know exactly what city their favorite band is in, plus view photos and updates, add comments to musician’s journals, and even find out where special events are located.

Loopt and NonStop Riot haven’t limited their marketing campaign for “Follow The Music” to the mobile phone either.  Using live video from each band on their MySpace pages and other web-based social networks, Loopt integrates steps to join the program on the traditional internet in order to reach as many possible user’s they can.  In our opinion, Loopt seems to have it all figured out when it comes to acquiring a massive user base for their application.

via venturebeat

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According to ABI Research the answer to the above question is yes.  By 2013, location-based social networks accessed on mobile phones will be a $3.3 billion business globally.  How much money they make now is negligible.  In fact, web-based social networks such as Facebook that have user numbers exponentially greater than the likes of Loopt and Whrrl still aren’t doing all that well.  VentureBeat reports that Facebook only expects to bring in a maximum of $350 million in revenues in 2008, three times that of 2007, but only roughly $9.78 per profile (a rough estimate from 35, 780, 441 unique visits).

Surprisingly though, mobile advertising won’t be the big driver of earnings in mobile social networking.  ABI Research says if anything, dollars will be generated by licensing and revenue-sharing models with wireless carriers.  If this is this case, then networks such as Loopt, carried by all major US wireless carriers are in a good position as is uLocate’s Where platform on which is built many mobile social networks.

Things could change in the next few years though.  Giant web-based networks like Facebook and MySpace will likely become mobile-friendly and with such giant user bases pose a serious threat to the present big names in location-based mobile social networking.  Loopt seems to know this, recently announcing the upcoming integration of Facebook Connect into their service allowing access to both networks’ profiles.  If you can’t beat them, join them, right?

There are still complications in mass adoption of mobile social networking at the present time.  First is privacy concerns.  Knowing that anyone in the world can know your exact location at any time is enough to cause nightmares for anyone.  And without unlimited data plans, playing around for hours on Loopt or their competitors platforms can be expensive.  Guaranteed though, by 2013 these two currently-big issues will be non-issues altogether.