Social Network Integrated Friend Finder ("Sniff") for the UK

Sniff goes live officially in the United Kingdom next month. It’s available on mobile operator o2, so anyone with an o2 handset reading, I’d appreciate you trying it out. I’ve got an o2 Blackberry, so theoretically I can try it out when I’m back in the UK. (I’d be dead impressed if you were able to ‘locate me’ with Sniff and you were sent a map of my Las Vegas location)

That’s what Sniff is all about. Friend Finder. You can, via text message, look up where your friends are in some detail.

Here’s what the release says:

sniff is a permission-based application that lets consumers locate their close friends in real-time, automatically, anytime and anywhere with their mobile phone or from Facebook. Additionally, sniff is the first ever Facebook application to automatically locate friends in real-time using mobile location technology. With seamless Facebook integration, finding friends is just a few clicks away.

Once consumers receive permission from their friends, using sniff is as simple as sending an SMS text message. sniff provides consumers with a detailed map view of their friends’ locations – making meeting up easier than ever before. sniff is already wildly popular in Sweden with over 80,000 users since its recent launch and growing rapidly.

Obviously privacy is a key issue. Every single one of those 80,000 users would have switched off right away if you weren’t able to completely configure your privacy settings. The ‘er, I’m at the office’ explanation won’t work too well when your girlfriend can see you’re at the pub with one text message.

CEO Brian Levin has a handle on it though, commenting:

“We are very mindful of our users’ privacy, with varying permission levels, sniff allows consumers to manage if, when and how their location information is shared with other parties. In addition, users have the ability to set-up notifications via SMS of key events such as being located or invited by another user to be part of the sniff network.”

It’s not a free application. You have to pay for it via a premium rate text message. Fair enough. If Sniff are using location based services, they’ll be paying THROUGH THE NOSE to the UK carriers for this. Off the street, your average LBS lookup costs 10p. Buy in bulk and you’ll get some discount. (But the idiot operators don’t quite get proper pricing strategies, we know this.)

It won’t just be o2 in the UK. They’ll have all major networks live soon — and they’ll be expanding to the States, Canada and France in due course.

I’ve been waiting for a decent location based friend finder style service for a while. Something like Dodgeball but that doesn’t need you to specifically update your location all the time.

Here’s how it works:

50p per sniff, eh? Hmm. I think that might be a leeetle bit too expensive when you factor in the ‘standard network message rate’ which may well bring the total consumer cost to near 60/65p per ‘sniff’. That would be positively annoying. But it’s the idiot operators charging per lookup that is the problem.

Or it’s a really stupid model. Someone told me you can get ‘unlimited lookup’ queries from the UK networks for a flat 2 grand a month. If that’s the case, charging nearly 60p a go for a lookup is highly, highly silly.

But, let me step back down off my pricing high-horse and see how it gets on.

More at www.sniffu.com.