Tech Peek Base

Before there was Gowalla or Foursquare, there was location-based social network Loopt. Launched in 2006, Loopt was one of the pioneers of the location-based mobile social network. And Loopt has gained a huge number of users of its mobile apps; the social network currently has 3 million mobile users, 1 million of which are on the iPhone. Compared to Foursquare and Gowalla, which have 150,000 and 50,000 users respectively, Loopt has a pretty significant user base. More recently, Loopt upgraded its mobile offerings to offer a check-in where you can also review a place and help recommend things for your friends to do, called Pulse. The mobile feature aggregates data on all of these “check-in spots,” which include, bars, restaurants, and more. It’s kind of like a local search engine. And it appears that this data is expanding Loopt’s business.

Now Loopt is venturing into Yelp’s territory (even as rumors swirl about Yelp) by making these local reviews available on the web. Similar to Yelp, each business has a separate page, where you can see hours, location (via a Google Map), ratings, pictures and more. Loopt will aggregate all the ratings and reviews made by mobile users on the business’ page, and web users can also comment on the page, but have to limit their comments to 140 characters or less. And Loopt aggregates reviews from professional sources like Zagat, and more user-review focused sites like Citysearch to further its recommendations on the page (this is also available on its mobile app). All of this data has allowed Loopt to create what founder Sam Altman refers to as a ?local search engine.? Two examples of pages can be found here and here. As of now, the pages have limited functionality but Loopt will be adding user generated content and other data shortly.