Wow, that's nice coverage. Though I do loath the way all new tech is portrayed in the most ominous fashion. Then when a real but mundane threat like overuse of antibiotics comes up, it gets very little play. I suppose TV News is just bad at getting the real story because they need to captivate the audience in 3 seconds.

Can someone post a clip with Omnisio so we can see it without that obnoxious preroll?

And here it is:

http://omnisio.com/v/ale5jVXdjhG/loopt-on-nbc

Appologies, but we don't officially support MSN yet, so seeking is not enabled, but you can still watch in full quality and add your annotations.

Enjoy!

no need to watch, pg. more doomsday talk about the end of privacy as we know it :)

Not bad, but is loopt going anywhere as a company? Just wondering, as I don't know anybody using it. Might do good as a free service, but having people pay for it might hamper their adoption. And critical mass is what is needed for this kind of applicaiton. Unless your friends are in there too, the service is not useful by itself.

According to their site, they already are charging people:

    How much does Loopt cost?

    Free until Jan 2008. After that date, new accounts
    get a 30-day Free Trial and then $2.99 a month.

Most of my friends and I don't use Loopt, but only because it's not offered for iPhone or AT&T yet. I think I would if I could.

I agree it needs to hit critical mass for it to really take off. I think the iPhone would definitely help with that.

I'm also unconvinced. The only time I hear about it is on here. Is it that much better than sending an SMS email or calling? Enough better to pay for??

Seems like a kind of useful feature you'd expect to be free with your phone.

To me, the value of Loopt isn't so much that if you want to meet up with a friend you already know where they are. Instead, it's if you're in a coffee shop and you notice that your friend is in the book store 100 feet away, you can take advantage of that opportunity. As Sam says, it's surprising how there are typically close friends in your general vicinity that you wouldn't know were there otherwise. SMS can't replicate this behavior.

Great interview Sam!

I was browsing hacker news in Dana st coffee house in downtown Mountain View. A guy stopped by my side and said "oh you are reading ycombinator ... my name is Sam Altman." Sam is the loopt founder.

I really liked what he did - to seize an opportunity to meet a real person. He could just pass by and we will just meet each other in ycobminator as virtual beings, but he chose to meet me for real.

I didn't know anything about loopt before this. So I looked at it today and I must say I would laugh at the idea if Sam didn't do what he did today.

To me, I would never use loopt for knowing where my friends are. They are already my friends so I would just call them if I want to meet them and so do they.

What I see loopt as an useful app is for the occasions such as today in that coffee house.

Sam talked to me because he saw me reading hacker news, and he likes meeting real person because that's what loopt is about. Combine these two aspects, an real useful application is to allow a virtual community, like the hacker news community, to meet each other in physical world. Instead of tracking your friends, loopt becomes really exciting if it can make you meet new friends.

Loopt can also show where potential friends often go to. Suppose I want to meet other hacker news users, I can check on the map where they often visit and I can go there to meet them. That will be really interesting too, meeting new friends that is.

Sam, I hope you are reading this.

Thanks for that summary, willz (and congrats on your first post). That really helped me see the "big deal" about Loopt. I read about it in pg's essays and visited the website, but I didn't see any extreme usefulness in an application that "shows you where your friends are." However, if it is expanded to the point of making recommendations, then I can indeed see the brilliance. It's like expanding Web 2.0 into the real world, isn't it?

That's very cool. I see, now. Although I can indeed as well think of many privacy concerns with Loopt (which Sam has probably solved), I wonder if you could use it as an aid to finding stolen or lost phones? Many possibilities come to mind.

This just adds to pg's thesis: startups are almost never what they start as, but what their users need them to become.

Thanks for being my first replier. You can't have privacy when you want to socialize. Philosophically, I find the "social media" ironical - they work to avoid people meeting each other.

By far the biggest opportunity for loopt is in dating. Dating, like mating, requires "signals". Suppose a guy going to a party, and receives a cell phone signal that a girl in the room is in dating mode, how cool that will be? $3/month is probably too cheap for sending and get those signals.

In general, an ice breaker is always needed in socializing (dating is the biggest subset). Loopt can be it.