Check-in service FourSquare has been around for a while Banjo, Glancee, Gowalla etc. have been around for under a year, but it was not until an iOS app called ‘Girls around me’ created a furor earlier this month that these services have begun to consciously bear the ‘creep’ tag. As described on the website, “Girls around me’ scans your surroundings and helps you find out where girls or guys are hanging out. You can also see the ratio of girls to guys in different places”. An article in Cult of Mac which described it as having “potential to be used as a tool for rapists and stalkers” gained disproportionate attention and eventually FourSquare revoked its API access and the company i-Free Innovations pulled it off the app store with a week.
Stepping back if we compare ‘Girls around me’ with Banjo and Glancee, you’ll realize that they don’t differ much in core functionality.
Banjo aggregates updates and check-ins from the services you, your friends, and people around you already use — like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter (via geotagged Tweets), Gowalla, Instagram, and more. You choose to authenticate yourself with either Facebook or Twitter and in a flash, you have access to a stream of tweets, updates, and check-ins from people in close proximity.
Glancee does not showcase as much as Banjo, but it can identify people around you who share common interests with you; the data being pulled from your Facebook profile.
In my opinion, the attention around the app was more to do with its branding and its Agent Provocateuresque design language than it was to do with its function. And while one could use the app to even scan for guys, the company chose to focus on just one clear market winning aspect of the product. Evidently, the company did itself no favor with this approach, but one can’t fault them for not being focused on clear messaging. Considering the galaxy of apps out there and the rage and excitement among renegade start-ups over social platforms, powerful branding, messaging, and targeting deserves attention, has clear merit, and should not be overlooked.
One of the key questions in branding is: Who are we talking to and what is the one clear message that we want them to takeaway? So, let’s just assume for a moment that the app was called ‘People around me’ – Would the offering seem as powerful and exciting?
Deric's blog 
Branding means a lot, especially with location-based apps that have so many similar competitors. I love apps like Banjo and Glancee. Haven’t tried the creeper one.
The one thing that isn’t mentioned in your post is that for the app to be useful at all it needs to have a certain amount of (female) users who not only download the app but also allow the app to see their location. Is there some sort of Trojan Horse app that the women use? Because I seriously doubt that many women will want to allow an app called “Girls Around Me” to access their location, even on the remote chance they actually download it.
If the implication wasn’t so sexual the idea would stand more on it’s merit; connecting mutually-minded individuals.
I agree with your point. Apparently, one did not need to have this app installed, and that is what does not make it right. Just because some developer can do something it does mean it should be done. Check-in status updates were being pulled from Foursquare and made available to those who had this app. Foursquare termed it as a violation of its API policy. And it definitely is….. But, I doubt there would have been such an uproar had the app been called something like ‘Squared up’ or ‘Checkout’ or something similar. My guess is that it would have probably gone unnoticed. The intent of this post was more about how Apps brand themselves (hence the title of the post) and for ‘Girls around me’ it was their name that did them in.