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iPhone is about to get a whole lot more social

As expected, during the company's WWDC keynote Steve Jobs and co. demoed some of the early fruits of Apple's official iPhone SDK and unsurprisingly we saw a number of social applications on display.
Written by Steve O'Hear, Contributor
iPhone is about to get a whole lot more social
As expected, during the company's WWDC keynote Steve Jobs and co. demoed some of the early fruits of Apple's official iPhone SDK and unsurprisingly we saw a number of social applications on display.

Social networking

While we didn't see the rumored MySpace client, we were shown two location-based social offerings -- made possible thanks to the iPhone's built-in 'Core Location' API, which in turn will be enhanced by the new 3G iPhone and its inclusion of a GPS radio.

First up was an app called "Nearby Friends" which shows your contacts within a 10-mile radius; it uses the Address Book API and Core Location API. Not sure if it will be a paid-for offering or offered for free.

Another location-based social network, Loopt (pictured above) was also demoed, which displays you and your friends via pins on a map. “We make serendipity happen,” Sam Altman of Loopt said. Loopt isn't going to be exclusive to iPhone (or iPod touch) -- a version of the app will exist on other mobile platforms, making it potentially a lot more useful as it will be able to exploit much bigger network effects i.e. it shouldn't matter which mobile device your friends are using. The iPhone Loopt client will be available for free.

Blogging

At Apple’s most recent shareholders meeting, in response to a question Steve Jobs said that if Apple didn't roll its own iPhone native blogging client then a third-party should (actually Jobs was a little more blunt, suggesting that the questioner should go away and learn Cocoa if he/she wanted a blogging app so bad).

In response, SixApart has developed an iPhone app that will make it simple to blog or photoblog, as along as you're using the company's TypePad platform I suspect.

Push notification

One of the major gripes of third-party iPhone developers is that apps aren't allowed to run in the background - in other words no true multitasking. Apple says this is to stop apps from inadvertently draining the device's battery or slowing its processor to a halt or eating up unnecessary bandwidth. The problem is that without apps being able to run in the background it's impossible for typical social Web functionality such as IM alerts or status updates, once a user closes the app in question.

Apple says it has now solved this problem through its own solution to 'push notification'. When a user quits an application, Apple will push updates from their servers to the iPhone. The developer’s servers push the notifications to Apple. Updates can include badges, sounds, custom messages. This functionality will be available in September.

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