Digital Marketing

Now app for iPhone uses Instagram to suggest cool places around you

The Now app for the iPhone makes use of photos from Instagram to judge which place is trending based on the amount of photos taken at that location. So you can know where the cool places are thanks to your friends on Instagram.

Suppose a friend of yours notices a street play and shares a photo of it on Instagram. The Now app will notify you of it and start collating photos of the event that are being shared by other users based on the tags. You now have numerous point of views of the location and can consider visiting it if it appeals to you. Instagram lets users tag their photos with the location at which it was taken. The Now app makes use of this data to make its predictions. Ben Broca, the creator of this app is continuously tweaking the apps code to ensure that you receive relevant results. For eg, a tourist place might attract more than a 100 users every day, but the Now app will give you a notification only when a specific event like an exhibition or an expo is being conducted. and more than 300 photos have been taken at the same place. The app will even send you a push notification if an Instagram friend takes a photo at the same event as you.

The app currently supports only a few US cities but will expand to include more over time.  You can follow the app on Twitter and make your voice heard to include your city in the app.  The app seems to be similar to Foursquare but utilizes data from Instagram instead. Also you can make a judgement of an event based on photos from other users instead of reviews like in Foursquare. This app can be quite useful to discover fun and trendy places around your location in real time.

This app is currently available only for the iPhone. You can download it for free from the app store. What are your thoughts about this app? Do you think you would find it useful? Let us know in the comments below.