NEWS

Social Network for iPhone Knows Where You Are, What You're Listening To

Wired
June 11, 2008
By Eliot Van Buskirk
   
 

TuneWiki's iLyricPlayer overlays lyrics on top of YouTube videos and other online audio sources to create a karaoke player for Apple iPhone and Google Android that lets users sing along with songs on the go. That's fine and dandy if you're into the idea of performing karaoke by yourself in the park, but TuneWiki's new GPS-driven feature is more interesting.

The new feature lets you see the locations of fellow TuneWiki users on a map, as well as what they're listening to. ILyricPlayer streams songs from YouTube, imeem and other sources.

As of 12:04 pm on Thursday, there were five users in the New York area -- two of them apparently at sea (see image to the right).
With a tap of the screen, you can listen in on their currently-playing songs. The image below reveals that one of the seafaring listeners was rocking Linkin Park.

That's apparently all TuneWiki does for now, and it currently only works on jailbroken iPhones. However, this strongly hints at what's to come for iPhone users, hopefully through Apple's iPhone App Store so that they won't have to jailbreak their iPhones in order to use it. However, the jailbreak aspect has one nice side effect: it means TuneWiki includes members from multiple cell networks.

 

The company was founded by two former Israeli fighter pilots, Amnon Sarig and his friend Rani Cohen, who is also the CEO of mSoft, "the world's largest aggregator and supplier of production music and sound" according to VentureBeat. The publication also mentions that they have launched TuneWiki in China, France, India, Indonesia, Russia and the United States, but not in their home country.

Again, the only data that TuneWiki currently shares is a user's location and what they're currently listening to, but it's not too hard to see where all of this is going.

The combination of music, mobile GPS and an opt-in social network with full user control over what information gets shared and with whom could be be a potent one for that age old pastime: real world friending.