Trackut review

Richard Goodwin

We review Trackut, an app that tells you the exact location of your friends

Published on Sep 18, 2009

Social networking has been a massive and extremely influential phenomena during the past few years - but what’s next?

According to Indian based solutions firm Interchain, you’ll have the ability to know where your friends are at anytime, and have their location pinpointed on a map, within an app on your mobile.

Upon opening Trackut you’ll see that the layout is very simple, and straight forward, with four primary options: My Maps, Messages, Network, and Settings. From here you can join networks, channels and groups, see who else is using the service in your area, invite people to join your network, or just simply spy on unsuspecting people.

During testing we got another colleague to join the service so that we could test what it could actually do. Following work, we went our separate ways, and once home, attempted to locate one another. We were both successful, and equally impressed with the speed at which our positions were located and shown on the app's Map function.

The app itself is designed to promote advanced social networking, and the option to add people to your network is a clear signifier of this - although, when we searched for other people using the service in our area - London - the actual numbers seemed to be pretty low.

The app uses GPS to triangulate your position. However, GPS is not a necessity, according to Interchain, and you can use the software without it - unfortunately, we didn’t have enough time to test this claim.

One bizarre function of the app is that you can set up points of interest on your Maps, say a bar or a pub, and then when one of your friends goes there, you will receive an alert.

Additionally, you can set alerts for when people on your network list are near by - whether this is a good thing or not, we couldn’t decide!

However, for the more cautious social networker, there is the option to hide your position, so that your movements will be concealed from other users.

Another interesting feature of the app is that you can join Channels or groups that send information to you depending on where you are. We joined a live music channel, and found that the results produced when wandering around London were actually quite useful and informative.

The apps search function uses the Yellow Pages and iCity Channels, which is useful for when you’re near home, or on holiday, although we didn’t have the opportunity to try the app abroad!

While this is quite a strange app, and perhaps a grim prediction of what the future holds, it’s quite a lot of fun, and does provide you with some useful information via its groups and channels, so in this sense, its definitely worth a look.