Loopt

» see loopt.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

loopt was us-only at the carrier layer. it shipped inside boost mobile contracts in 2006, then sprint in 2008, then verizon, then iphone. every distribution channel was an american mobile-carrier partnership, and the partnerships were the whole business. nobody in turkey signed up for a loopt account because there was no turkish carrier in the deal sheet and the app store presence outside the us was thin to nonexistent.

the product was the obvious thing: a map with your friends as dots on it. you could see where they were in real time, send them a ping, see notes attached to a location. dodgeball had done a stripped-down version of this two years earlier as an sms service; loopt was the first attempt to do it as a real native app with a real map and real photo tiles. for two years it was the most plausible location-aware social network in the us market.

sam altman was twenty when he co-founded it with nick sivo, his stanford classmate, and alok deshpande. y combinator funded the first batch in summer 2005. the company raised about $39 million across its life. altman was its ceo until the acquisition. he became president of y combinator the next year and is now better known for a different job.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the cracks ~

by 2010 the four million registered users had collapsed to a tiny daily active number. the carrier partnership model put loopt in front of phones at activation time but did almost nothing for retention. people downloaded it as part of a sprint setup wizard, opened it once, did not understand why they would broadcast their location to a list of contacts who were not also using the same niche app, and never opened it again.

foursquare launched in march 2009 with the check-in mechanic that made location-sharing voluntary and gamified instead of passive and ambient. that is the model that worked. loopt's always-on background-tracking approach was both creepier and less rewarding, and the carrier-bundled distribution kept giving them registration numbers without the daily-active numbers that matter.

~ what really happened ~

green dot, the prepaid debit-card company, bought loopt on march 9, 2012 for $43.4 million. the announced plan was to fold the location and social tech into green dot's emerging mobile-banking product. the consumer app kept running for another year while the engineering team moved over, and on march 12, 2013 loopt was shut down. nothing of the brand survived inside green dot's banking products either.

~ the long tail ~

apple's find my friends, released in october 2011 alongside icloud and ios 5, made every standalone location-share app instantly redundant on iphone. google latitude did the same on android for a while before google killed it in 2013. by the time green dot turned off loopt, the entire category of standalone us location-sharing apps had been collapsed into operating-system features that did the same thing better with no second account to maintain.

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