[Skywing]

This happened to me when Yobongo was announced.

I had been working on basically the exact same concept for several months. Mine was named GeoHello. I was building mine as a web app, meant to be used by mobile devices. I felt that a native app would be better, but I didn't have any iOS experience at that point in time, so I went with web. I had the demo finished and even began trying to get people to try it out. In general, everybody thought it was neat. Then, a few days later, word of Yobongo started to show up on TechCrunch as a project that was being started by a team with somebody that was well known in the Valley. They were also building it as a native iOS app.

I was pretty depressed for a little while, but it actually played to my advantage because I got to see how Yobongo tackled many of the chicken and egg problems that a real time location based app faces. There were a few other apps that appeared shortly after Yobongo that were doing the same thing. I'm pretty sure that none of them are around anymore because that's a pretty difficult problem to overcome.

[ninetax]

Yeah, I bet that's a difficult problem. It would be pretty cool to see how WA implemented this, unfortunately they don't say. I did get a good perspective of how useful this kinda of service is and how much people are interested in it, whereas before I doubted it would be useful beyond my own curiosity.