There are lots of ways to find your friends using your phone, whether it be snapmap, a pinpoint, or just good old fashion talking to each other & juggling directions. Today, I'm here to tell you about an alternative you may prefer: ItLit.
The Story
One night around midterms, I decided to stay at home and study instead of going out. After a few hours of procrastination, I started studying and shortly realized that there really wasn't much studying needed to be done. I realized that I maybe should have gone out instead. The problem with going out when it's already late is that people are interacting with their environment more than their phones. I couldn't find anyone. So instead, I started coding ItLit.
The Dream
The goal of the app was to broadcast your location to your friends, even when not at your phone. I envisioned that this app might accompany a person on their night out. At the beginning of the night, with your phone fully charged, you would tap a button and begin sharing your location with friends that you specify. Your friends could easily track you down any time throughout the night, no communication necessary. You could also find friends who are also out on the town, or who are maybe just pregaming at their house. I wanted the app to be minimal, because I believe some apps have more features than their users know about or need. In that spirit, I made it so that accounts were just phone numbers, and not tied to any social media account or username. Also, there is no messaging within ItLit; instead, there is a brief "status" setting which shows up next to you on the map. If you want to message someone who is online, simply pressing and holding their info window on the map will open up an SMS conversation with them. Tapping a friend's icon will zoom in, and holding down on the map will zoom you out.
Some Benefits
Convenience: one app that does one simple thing.
Cross-platform: Android & iOS, with possible support for Windows phone if there is demand.
Constant updates: snapmap locations only update when you are using Snapchat.
*Note: this app is not here to compete with Snapchat, it's complementary. Most people keep their snapmap pretty exclusive and are reluctant to change who can see them. Who can see you is intended to vary more often with ItLit.Privacy: only people whom you specify may view your location, and only when you chose to share it. ItLit doesn't keep a copy of your password anywhere (rest assured, we're open source), nor do we keep track of where you have been. We have plans to collect metadata, see our privacy policy.
Security: this app can save your life if you black out in the middle of nowhere while you're lit.
The Reality
Without further ado, I present to you: ItLit! an app for finding parties.
The Vision
My goal is to monetize this app for users (you), so that people sharing their location with the app can get paid. I plan to do this using EOS.io software. I had plans to create an ERC20 token on Ethereum and having an ethereum node issue shares, but, in addition to the cost of running a full node, the problem of the centralized point of failure exists: my amazon EC2 computer, holding the secret key of asset issuance. In the future, instead of using python and mongoDB, I would like to run an EOS client and upload a contract which will handle the logic, data, and asset issuance in a credible manner. At this point in the future, ItLit will adopt account names under EOS and you will be able to earn litcoin (aka equity) for being online. The benefit of this model is that like Steem, users have monetary incentive to simply use the services within the app.
At this point in time, there's only handful of users, and I don't even use it really. I bet there are parties out there, though, who are looking for an app like this, for stuff like music festivals or theme parks. Currently, Amazon is kind enough to let me host for free, but when the user base grows, I will need to start paying for the server! So do me a favor and don't share this.
Thank you for reading.