[UK] Social mobile location startup Rummble has gradually been updating its service over the last few weeks to meet the oncoming competition from new kids of the block like Foursquare. As we prefaced recently in the Summer, today it’s launched a new Android app for its service (download here). Rummble has had an iPhone app for a while and a Windows Mobile version is in the works.
Furthermore it has also implemented the Twitter’s new Geotagging API which provides accessible location context to tweets from Rummble check-ins and reviews. This works with new versions of twitter clients like Tweetie, Tweetdeck and Seesmic Web, which launched support for the Twitter Geotagging API earlier this week. That means Rummble users can geotag tweets with their current location (if they choose to share it) and any venue in the world. This real-time geo-data is consumable by everyone on Twitter, regardless of whether they are signed up to Rummble or not.
This is one of the first social apps (outside of twitter clients) to use geo tweets. It adds geo lat/long into tweets for Twitter’s Location-api for status updates posted out of Rummble. This covers the user’s location, check-ins and tweets posted of Rummble reviews of a bar or cafe etc. Tweets from the Gowalla and Foursquare aps are geotagged if the setting has been switched on in twitter settings.
The 6 person Rummble is better known in the UK and Europe generally as a location based discovery tool and social search platform. Although on first appearances Rummble can look like a Yelp or a Qype with lots of information about a venue you are in or those nearby, it is in fact more focused on the people who visit a place and how trustworthy their recommendarions are. As a three-year old startup which has concentrated on location it has a lot more of a granular service where you can do a lot with your location. And although it’s not really a game like Foursquare, it has now released an API to enable anyone to build a gaming-platform on top of it.
Rummble is also starting to feed pure ‘check-in-like’ data’ directly from Twitter with it’s Tremors app, potentially making it quite powerful as a way to rate both places and people than Foursquare’s gaming system. However, it’s my view that Foursquare’s ‘pigeon-simple’ game (obessesively checking-in like a pigeon hitting a button to get food) has some way to run yet. It’s going to be an interesting battle.
Rummble was founded by CEO Andrew J Scott and CTO Clive Cox and is on @Rummble
