Ping

Ping is a privacy-conscious, location-sharing mobile app. When you ping your friends to get their location, the app automatically sends them your location too. By leveraging social relationship and trust, Ping allows users to make their location available 24/7, but ensures that location is only accessed when it matters.

The Problem

In our day to day lives, we often find ourselves texting friends asking about location. However, it can often take too long to get a response. We want instant access location to friend location when it matters, but without invading privacy. There's a need for an app that implements general purpose location-sharing without letting others abuse their access to potentially private information

The Solution

Ping is unique in that it allows you access to friend location 24/7, but due to the reciprocal location sharing, users can't abuse the feature, or use it in a creepy way. By alerting people when you've pinged them, Ping makes sure users are only requesting location info when they have good reason to. Reciprocal location sharing also helps speed the process of arranging to meet up somewhere, or coordinate plans in general. Not only does reciprocal location sharing prevent misuse of the app, it's the natural progression of "where are you?" conversations anyways! Ping makes location sharing easier, faster, more accessible, and more private, all at once.

Key Features

• Send your friends a ping to get their location
• Friends get a push notification letting them know that you pinged them, which shares your location with them
• An adjustable visibility radius ensures only friends who are physically close enough can access your location
• Users can send an emergency ping which overrides visibility radius and alerts the user that they have been emergency pinged
• Effortless signup through facebook instantly links you to all your facebook friends on the app

Potential Use Cases

• Friends can easily ping each other at lunch or dinner time to see if they're nearby for a meal -Housemates can check on who's home, who's out, and who's at work
• Kids aren't crazy about their Mom and Dad having their location 24/7, but as long as they can see how often they're getting checked in on, they'll be more willing to give parents location access for when it counts
• You might not want all your relatives on Find my Friends--that's just weird...but these are definitely people you'd want to be able to instantly share location with in emergency situations

What's next for Ping

We've had this idea for a while, and now that it's finally built, we're excited to personally use it. Once we get to test it for ourselves, we hope to perfect the core functionality of Ping to achieve our goal of the best solution for location-sharing. We're also excited thinking about what additional features could make Ping a complete user-experience,. Some possibilities include:

• Facilitating in person meetups start to end (in-app shortcuts or messaging for better meetup coordination?),
• Providing extra information in emergency pings to more effectively let others know if you're ok
• Allowing users to create groups to send out mass pings
• Location settings to share location only if in designated areas (e.g. school, work, home, mid-commute)

Built With

• react-native
• ruby-on-rails