There’s been an explosion in social location apps for smartphones in the last year, most of which let you check-in to real-world venues and see where your friends are at. Foursquare, Gowalla, Rummble, Brightkite, Loopt… More are springing up every month too.
Now another location-based service, Buzzd, has hit on the sensible idea of aggregating data from as many social location apps as possible, and using it to work out what places are hot in a given city in real-time. Whenever you fire up the Buzzd app, you’ll be able to see the most popular venues in your city in the last six hours, based on check-ins in all those other apps.
The new aggregation feature is in the latest update to Buzzd for iPhone and BlackBerry. The app is mainly focused on the US, but I’ve been playing with it this morning, and it does cover UK venues too. Although the two ‘buzzing places’ served up based on my location (Bishop’s Stortford) are both in central London, which isn’t ideal.
Still, the idea of making sense of social location check-ins by collecting as much data as possible from all the different services is a good one, so it’ll be interesting to see how Buzzd develops in the months ahead.
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