zhiing – Location Messaging is not a social network, but it definitely connects people. It is a free mobile GPS messaging app that is an innovative use of Ovi Maps and other mapping software. It connects GPS-enabled S60 5th Edition and 3rd Edition device users to each other, and to others with PCs, Macs, other smartphones, and even in-car navigation systems. It combines exchange of text messages with dynamic mapping and turn-by-turn voice directions. It allows two people on the go to find each other and see dynamically-updated routes to each other as they move around. In the parlance of the application, users are receiving ‘zhiings’, as they ‘zhiing’ one another.

Another key use case is in individual travel routing. A person can send himself a set of zhiings, each of which is a different location, such as the itinerary for a given outing. Then, on the road, he can move from point to point with voice guidance and dynamic street mapping.

I gave this app a spin using two Nokia N97′s and a desktop PC to represent the kinds of interactions that take place on zhiing. I used the PC to access zhiing’s web-based interface at www.zhiing.com, but one can also do this from the browser of an S60 device.

My itinerary was to stop off at North Beach Pizza and then head for the chess tournament in downtown San Francisco. To give myself the maps and routing directions without actually first going to those points, I sent zhiings of those addresses to my Nokia N97 from a facility on the zhiing web page. At the bottom of the zhiing home page, right next to the company address, there is the zhiing rings icon that looks like this:

Clicking on this icon on the Web page brings up a dialog box that lets you send zhiings from the Web page. The dialog box looks like this:

Zhiinging the North Beach Pizza location to my Nokia N97.

I sent zhiings to my mobile phone and to a friend’s phone in San Mateo for the pizza parlor location, the chess tournament location, and my house. These zhiings can be re-used later to produce dynamic route mapping from anywhere to those points.

It is also very important to point out that zhiing automatically knows your GPS position, so if you want to just mark your present location as a Zhiing, then you don’t need to type in an address in this dialog box.

On my Nokia N97, the zhiings appeared in my Inbox.

zhiings containing location routing and personal messages appear in the Inbox.

Clicking on the zhiing, it opens up the message that reminds me what kind of pizza to get.

Messages appear in the Zhiings.

Clicking on Options, I then chose to view the route to the pizza parlor. Notice that I could have also chosen to just view it on a map, reply to the zhiing, or forward it to a friend.

Options for Zhiing handling.

The routing option opens up an Ovi Map view showing me the route to the pizza parlor.

View routing from present location to the zhiing location.

Then, it initiates turn-by-turn voice navigation using a local 3D map view.

Turn-by-turn voice directions to the pizza parlor.

Since I sent the same zhiing to my friend in San Mateo, he sees the same endpoint, but a different route from his present location to the pizza parlor and different turn-by-turn directions.

There is even a dashboard view for keeping track of how far you have gone, how far it is to the destination,  and how long the trip has taken.

zhiing route dashboard.

There is also a very social aspect to zhiings, in that each zhiing can contain a message from the sender to the recipient. Just as people send SMS text messages back and forth, that function can now be absorbed within zhiing (and it’s free!). In fact, zhiing can be viewed as an alternative to SMS messaging, and with the additional enhancement of the mapping and dynamic routing tied in. In the screen below, for example, scrolling down from the reply shows the text interaction between myself and my friend from San Mateo as we made our way to the chess tournament.

zhiings are also mechanisms for back-and-forth text communication between two zhiingers. Here a reply to a previous message is being composed, where scrolling down shows the stream of previous messages.

For group get-togethers, one just adds a comma after the phone number of each participant in the address field, and the zhiing goes out to everyone on the list. This is handy, for example, if your meeting venue is changed at the last minute and you want everyone to know how to get to the new meeting location.

zhiing – Location Messaging can be downloaded for free in Ovi Store.