China’s Soso Maps App Updates, Helps Find Your Friends in Real-Time

Younger readers might not realise how hard it was to connect with a friend outdoors before the era of mobile phones. Both people had to turn up at the right spot at the right time with no digital assistance. Imagine that. It can still be tricky to track down your buddy these days even when you both have smartphones. And that’s why the Chinese online mapping app Soso has added added a real-time location tracker to its iPhone and Android maps app.

The new Soso tracker feature is a lot like Apple’s ‘Find My Friends’ service which in turn was like Google’s Latitude. As seen in the screenshots below, it’s an optional thing that’s activated by hitting the “find him/her” button and then messaging a generated link to your friend, who can then click that to tune into your real-time movements. To provide some security, the Soso app won’t track for any longer than 24 hours, and your position is not made public.

Personally, I think giving a static location is quite sufficient, and I’ve used that method numerous times via the Google Maps and Baidu Maps apps. Real-time is neat – see the pretty awesome Glympse app, for example – but it seems like over-kill for the simple task of finding a mate out on the street.

But, the new Soso Maps feature comes at an opportune moment for its maker, Tencent (HKG:0700), China’s biggest web company, as Apple’s name is being dragged through the mud for its lousy new maps app in iOS 6. Local rival Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) also rolled out a big update to its maps app over the weekend, adding real-time traffic info.

Soso Maps, despite being made by Tencent, is only China’s ninth most popular mobile mapping service with a mere 2.5 percent market share by the middle of this year.

Get the Soso apps from their homepage, though I think the Symbian versions don’t get this new feature.

[Source: Tech2IPO – article in Chinese]