It’s no secret that I’m a fan of BlackBerry. Yes, I know that BlackBerry are currently unfashionable and it’s apparently (judging by the media) the ‘in thing’ to bash BlackBerry at the moment, but I’ve been using their phones for the last 5 or 6 years, and I’ve always been happy with them. That said, one of the big selling points of BlackBerry has traditionally been BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), which I’ve never been a particularly big user of – not least because I didn’t really know that many people who were also using BlackBerry devices (and the number has been slowly dwindling over the years). However, that changed a few months ago, when BlackBerry released versions of BBM for the iPhone and for Android phones (with a Windows Phone coming soon – just for Andrew Thorne).
One of the things I like about BBM is that it provides definitive ‘delivered’ and ‘read’ indicators for every BBM message that you send. (WhatsApp also claims to do this, but it doesn’t actually do it – the ‘delivered’ just means ‘delivered to the server’ and ‘read’ just means ‘delivered to the phone’, so it’s not the same thing.) I have two (out of three) slippery kids who were in the habit of claiming that they never got my texts saying that they had to be home at a certain time, or telling them to do their homework before I got home from work, or pretty much anything else that they don’t really feel like doing. One has an iPhone, and the other a Samsung running Andriod, so when BBM went cross-platform I made them both install (and use) it. So now when I send them a message, I know that they have received and read it. And if I don’t see that status indicator flipping to “R”, I’ll make an angry phone call to find out why.
All well and good, but BBM also added another feature in the latest release that I think is absolutely outstanding. This is Glympse (yes, crappy name, but bear with me). Using Glympse, a BBM user can allow another (named) BBM user to see (‘glimpse’ – I guess that’s where the name comes from) their exact location – as pinpointed by GPS – for a specified period of time (5 minutes up to 4 hours). The receiving user sees a map, with the sharing user’s exact location, and direction and speed of movement, updated in real time, on a map. This has proven invaluable when my eldest has asked me to pick him up. I tell him to start walking and share his location, and I can drive to exactly where he is, safe in the knowledge that I’m not going to accidentally miss him when he ducks down a sidestreet, or nips into a shop, or – more likely – just sits down where he is and waits for me to arrive, instead of walking. I also share my location with him, and he can see how far away I am, and can make sure he’s standing on the correct corner when I get there. Both his location and mine are shown on the same map that we’re both looking at, so there’s no confusion about exactly which corner he should be waiting on. The image on the right shows a screenshot from my phone last time I did this (the status panels at the top are usually hidden, but I expanded them here) – his location is shown as a blue arrow and mine as a gray one. Pretty nifty, huh?
There’s another useful application of this. Say my daughter tells me she wants to go study at a friend’s house. I cam make it a condition that she shares her location with me, so I can check that she is actually where she shays she is going to be. Of course, she could just leave her phone at her friend’s house and then go somewhere else, but the occasional BBM message will confirm this – thanks to the ‘read’ indicator. Yes, it all sounds a bit overbearing or overprotective, but with a 12-year old “willfull” daughter, I don’t think I’m unjustified (and past experience will bear me out on this). And if she then isn’t where she says she is, and I ground her, I can then use Glympse to make sure that she does indeed go straight home after school, and doesn’t leave the house. It’s just one win after another!
That said, I do see some less sinister uses for Glympse. Say you’re due to meet a bunch of friends in town for a pint (or coffee, or whatever floats your boat). You can just arrange a time, share your locations, and easily make your way towards each other when you get there. None of this “Oh, I thought you meant the Railway Arms, not the Railway Tavern…”. Or maybe you’re out shopping with the missus, and she says she “just wants to nip in to Ann Taylor Loft”, and then two hours later she’s nowhere to be found. If she’s shared her location, you can easily see that she’s now moved on to Victoria’s Secret and can make your way there with a smile on your face and a feeling of eager anticipation in your loins. Or maybe you’ve got a nasty habit of losing your phone when you go out on the town. Just share your location with a friend before you leave home, and when you inevitably leave your phone in a bar somewhere, they will be able to see exactly where you left it. You just need to call them up and ask them where it is. Oh, wait…
Anyway, draconian overtones aside, I’m pretty impressed with Glympse. It may not necessarily ‘save’ BlackBerry (although I personally think they’re going to do just fine), but it sure beats paying AT&T $14.99 a month for their ‘FamilyMap’ service…
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