Some six months ago, we had a small conniption over an augmented reality application for Twitter on the iPhone.
With the release of Twitter’s geotagging API, however, users were bound to see more and better AR apps for the popular microblogging service. Twitter 360 has just come up on our radar, and it looks like a dream from the outset. But will its features live up to user expectations?
Back in the day, we wrote of TwittARound, “You can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are. To accomplish this, TwittARound uses a combination of the iPhone’s compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS to determine the location of tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed.”
Sadly, Apple wouldn’t allow the app in the App Store and would only work on a jailbroken 3GS.
How, then, does this new hotness compare?
First, it’s not a full-featured Twitter client. The team plans to add more features as time goes by, but with so little time between the official geotagging API’s announcement and this application’s debut, we’re clearly looking at a case of “launch early, launch often.”
On startup, the app updates a user’s location automatically, and it also allows for an “invisible mode” during which the user isn’t discoverable through digital means.
For users who have enabled the geotagging feature in Twitter, the app annotates tweets with location information. That users’ friends can then see, via augmented reality, the location from where that user’s last tweet was posted.
The Latest Tweets mode shows the latest tweets of followed users and the location from where they were posted. When a tweet is selected, the users sees a blue arrow indicating the direction and distance to the location from where the tweet was posted.
In Locate my Friends mode users can find their friends, again with a blue arrow showing the distance and direction to a friend’s location.
Moreover, Twitter 360 plays nicely with Google Maps:
Currently, the app is available on 3GS devices only. And yes: It’s made it to the App Store.
Check out this nifty demo video, and let us know what you think in the comments:
