Rally Up – Location Based Social Networking

Rally Up seems to have a couple things that Foursquare and Gowalla don’t have. Firstly the 12Seconds.tv team at the helm but also a serious consideration for privacy. As with other location based social networking apps there are badges to be won as an incentive, but this app does seem more focused on connecting you with your closer friends that you may converse with outside of twitter and in ‘real life’.

I was impressed by the way this app protects your home location from the off and after connecting to people via searching for their names or looking in your address book you can choose between four different privacy settings on a funky little slider. This is the filtering we have been waiting for for a while now and I imagine we may see this model copied more than once on up and coming apps.

You can choose to not share information with a particular person, to seeing the person’s update but not sharing any info with them. Or you can allow them full access and get push notifications etc. This gets over some of the etiquette and more serious privacy issues when getting a friend request for someone you are not quite sure about.

I have not had too much of a play so far but i’m liking the way that the app integrates photos into the feed as a kind of transparency until you click to see more. You can also tell people you are heading to a place. I have lost count of how many times i have tweeted ‘Going to..” or “On the way to..” I have a feeling this may come in handy even if you can only share with facebook outside the app at the moment. I kind of see the reason for this but not being a facebook fan I think i will be conversing with my ‘Real Friends’ within the app.

I’m also looking forward to trying out the temporary locations feature for when you want to set up an impromptu social media get together in a random space.

After this quick look It’s definitely a different breed from the normal location based apps I have played with. Whether it will keep me away from my normal twitter feed remains to be seen. I like the design, the concept, the privacy angle and the team behind it.. so who knows..

Here is a link to Download Rally Up from iTunes and if you want to ‘Rally Up’ with my search for ‘Documentally’.