Review: Social Scout
Score:
72%
Beyond navigation and route planning, the promise of location-based smartphone apps is still an area in which developers can make their mark in the Windows Phone store. Social Scout steps up to take 'where you are' and 'what's around you' (with a bit of Facebook in the mix) to see if it can deliver.
Version Reviewed: 1.4.7.0
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Developers and entrepreneurs have been trying to get 'location' and 'social' working together for a long time. Foursquare looked to be the potential winner in all of this, but that first approach of badges and check-ins has morphed into a special offers and location recommendation engine. Others have come and gone, asking for location data and doing their best to offer value by return.
This is the key, not just to a location app, but any app or service that you interact with on your smartphone, or online. You give up something (in the case of this review, it would be your location data and your social graph from a network), and the application will offer you back something that you should value more.
Which is where things stand with Social Scout. It asks you for your location as well as asking you to log in to Facebook and allowing the app access to your friends list from the social graph of the network. With your location, the Facebook database of interesting places and how well you and your friends would potentially like those places, plus the check-in data from your friends, Social Scout will give you a view of the local area through your own social network lens.
In theory, there is nothing to stop Facebook adding such a feature (this app is, after all, using data just from Facebook, plus the smartphone's own location). But Facebook's primary focus has rarely been about the check-in and showing you people around you, it's about surfacing stories and content. Which is where a dedicated app such as Social Scout can come into its own.
On first running the app (and after a potential 'wave of the handset round in a figure of eight' to calibrate the compass), you'll see a list of locations close by. Click on these for more information on their popularity in Facebook, along with a button to start navigating towards the venue from your current location - this ties into the navigation apps on your handset, so on my Lumia 925 Here Maps started up to take me to my choice.
You can also see which of your friends has checked in to the venue. It's a shame this takes a few steps and the main list is a global check-in view, I think it would be nice to have an option to populate or even sort the main list of locations using just the information from your friends. I can appreciate somewhere sparsely populated might need to default to the global check-ins to get enough volume, but in a rich environment such as a conference or the hipster infused areas of Shoreditch and San Francisco I could see it becoming flooded with data.
You can also check-in yourself from the app, as well as 'like' the venue on Facebook. Given the app already knows they exist in Facebook's database, this is an easy win for the developer.
Your friends list in Social Scout is a little more straightforward. You have a list of friends who are close by, a second list of places you have asked the app to 'keep an eye on' so you can see when people check in, and a list of current location check-ins from around the world of all your friends.
Clicking through, you'll have some confirmation of your friend at the location (likely a moving map at the top of the screen), as well as the thumbnails of people who have liked this location. Again, you can 'like' directly from the app, leave a comment, or set up the ability to monitor who checks in here (see the menu above!)
What you don't have is a direct way to interact with your friend. You can click on their avatar to see a full list of their check-ins, but the only interaction is a link through to Facebook. That's clunky at best, and kind of defeats part of the purpose of the app, at least in my eyes. Finding someone and communicating with them is a large part of what can drive this app to success, and it is an area where the app is unfortunately lacking.
Complementing these two main features, you have an events tab, sorted by proximity and date to your location; a list of popular places, a history of notifications that the app has given you, and some recommendations on your location.
Social Scout takes Facebook's location data and starts to do something useful with it. Technically, it can handle the incoming data, parse it, and present it to the user in a pleasing way. But it doesn't feel that the app is doing anything 'smart' with the data. What venues do my friends like that are close to me, where is everybody, how do I speak to someone about a restaurant from inside the application... all these small areas where the final step does not seem to have been committed to, bring the score of the application down.
It's an app that could do very well if it was polished, but I fear that relying on an in-app advertising model will not be strong enough to support the team. This release will go into maintenance mode, not having made enough money to justify engineering time, but gathering just enough downloads to create a small but steady stream of revenue - which sounds like the worst place to be for a developer looking to move forwards with a neat (albeit not world-changing) application.
Enjoy Social Scout, and if you forgive it its faults, there is a useful application in here.
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at