Skyhook Wireless has announced that four iPhone apps have integrated the Local Faves social location framework. The diverse set of apps, for wine drinkers, parents, birders, and music lovers, are all taking advantage of social location to make their apps more engaging.
Local Faves is a framework that brings the best engagement tactics from web and print, like location, stats and rankings, infographics, and social features to iPhone apps. By optimizing for mobile devices and providing seamless integration into apps, Local Faves can add engaging new features in very little development time.
Sharetunes, an enhanced music player app, uses Local Faves as a discovery tool to help users find songs playing nearby. It also lets users share where they heard songs. “Local Faves adds an interesting new element to Sharetunes. It will keep my users coming back again and again to check the latest songs playing nearby,” said Nathan Piper, developer of Sharetunes. “Integrating Local Faves has created an instant community environment within my app.” Sharetunes with Local Faves will be available later this month.
In Drync, a top wine app, Local Faves allows users to tag the locations where they drank or bought their favorite wines and to view the most popular wines in their neighborhood or around the world. “Local Faves adds social elements to Drync that connect users to activity within the app,” said Brad Rosen, CEO of Drync. “The integration saved us at least three person-months of development time it would have taken to build these features in house.”
Doublewedge, developers of Babymate, a full-featured tool for parents to track their babies’ growth and development like first steps and birthdays, has added Local Faves to help parents track exactly where their babies reached important milestones, connect with other parents, and share new developments online.
Green Mountain Digital has added Local Faves to Audubon Birds of Central Park, and bird lovers can now track their favorites, find the top spot in the park to see their favorite bird, and get notifications when another user logs a sighting of that bird.
“Social location features can make any app more engaging,” said Kate Imbach, vice president of marketing at Skyhook Wireless. “Visuals, connecting with other users, rankings and sharing to social networks are designed to foster a more addicted app user base. Skyhook’s work with Drync, Sharetunes, Babymate, and Audubon Birds of Central Park show that any app, regardless of the type of content it serves, can benefit from social location features.”
All of the apps mentioned can be found in the iTunes App Store.
