Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

When buzzd's Nihal Mehta mentioned Stalqer at OMMA Mobile, he got a chuckle from the crowd. But while the name may be funny, this app is no joke. Stalqer is a new mobile friend locating service that is pending Apple's app store stamp of approval.

While similar to other location based services like Loopt and Foursquare, Stalqer does two things that those don’t: it passively gathers information, and it pulls in friends from other networks.

As CNET explains:

On the mobile platform that matters, the iPhone, there's no way to do real-time location reporting without running an app all the time, and the iPhone doesn't allow background processes. And even if it did, it would draw down the battery. The Stalqer solution is to create a dummy e-mail account that pings the Stalqer servers whenever the phone polls for mail, which is, by default, every 15 minutes.

Competing mobile social apps require the app (Foursquare, Loopt) or site (Latitude) to be open for the user's location to be reported. Or they require a phone that supports background processing, like an Android device.

This makes Stalqer a good example of the Mobile Crowdsourcing trend we highlighted last week, in that it passively gathers data from people’s phones, using them as a type of sensor.

Your friends aren't on your friend-location service… Stalqer takes data from your friends' Facebook locations in combination with the live data from other Stalqer subscribers to give you a pretty comprehensive map of everyone you know.

Unfortunately, Facebook data is often wrong, and Stalqer doesn't yet divide location data from content posted in wall messages or on Twitter. [Stalqer founder Mick] Johnson says it will do that eventually. He says that the data is about 70 percent accurate at the moment but that "I think it will be enough."

What the app does is aggregate and match—combining what you can see with your Facebook login with your phone's contact list. It assumes that if you have the person's e-mail address on your phone that they're a real contact of yours, thus letting you track and contact them. While this sounds like a dubious assumption, Johnson says managing privacy well is a big part of the app. Stalqer doesn't break privacy settings or report data that isn't otherwise available to its users. Those running the reporting app can turn it on or off, control the granularity of its reports, and report different levels of data to different groups.

Johnson told CNet that all social networks will become mobile social networks and that location reporting must be a big part of their feature sets. We agree 100%. Right now, a lot of users are checking their Facebook and Twitter accounts from their phones, and this number will only increase. That is why the idea of pulling in friends from other networks is so smart; it will decrease the barrier to entry and spur viral expansion.

One more aspect worth highlighting is the app's augmented reality component, which shows you which friends are nearby and sorts by distance. This remind us of Aka-Aki, which essentially hyperlinks people, showing information about users nearby via Bluetooth. Combine Aka-Aki's functionality with Stalqer's friend viewer and you have the future of SNS--the ability to hover over a person and see all their profile information on your screen right there. And yes, this may sound creepy now too, but come on, it's truly amazing stuff. And likely a harbinger of apps to come.

You can follow @stalqer for updates from the company on their App Store status and other news.