Like chatting on Kik? As of today, you can let your friends know where you’re at thanks to a new partnership with Glympse. The temp location sharing technology now makes it so Kik’s 150 million subscribers can easily share their whereabouts with their buddies from within the messaging app.
The new feature is aptly named Glympse for Kik and works within the familiar messenger app to share your location with your friends and contacts. There’s no need to leave Kik to share your locale if you have Glympse installed — it’s fully integrated.
The hope here is to make a more interactive experience for Kik lovers. “Location and messaging are tailor-made for each other,” says Darren Austin, vice president of product for Glympse. He reasons that since texting is so popular and since a common question sent via that channel is “Where are you?” adding the location sharing tech is just plain common sense. Austin also calls this a “continuing” step toward “push[ing] forward with a new wave of messaging that does more than just static text.”
Glympse for Kik allows you to share your location with individuals, or you can request or reply with a Glympse in the middle of a conversation. There’s also the option to view a friend’s location on a live map within an already established conversation.
Integrating a variety of features into Kik isn’t new for the company. Back in February, it launched a built-in web browser to discourage people from closing the app.
In December 2013, Kik reached 100 million users. The company was founded in 2009 and is currently headquartered in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
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Glympse is the pioneer of person-to-person location sharing in real-time, for a set amount of time. With an intuitive design and enhanced features, such as Glympse Groups, the company easily integrates location sharing into every day a... read more »
Kik was founded in 2009, when a small but incredibly passionate group of University of Waterloo students decided to build a company that would shift the center of computing from the PC to the phone. Based in Waterloo, Ontario the comp... read more »
