With the market for location based services heating up, it’s important for Koprol to at least keep in line with the competition if not leap ahead of the rest. Facebook Places is already live in Indonesia albeit only for BlackBerry users and Google HotPot is knocking on the door.
Currently Koprol’s primary competition in the check-in space is Foursquare which is still racking up checkins and to the dismay of many, producing jumpers thanks to lack of attention to its mobile site.
A jumper is a term popularly used by Indonesian Foursquare users to call someone who checks in at one place while being in a completely different location, primarily done to acquire badges.
A jump is made easier because Foursquare’s mobile site has not been updated to take advantage of geo detection in HTML5. Because Foursquare has a strong game element, jumpers are seen by many as those who play against the spirit of the game.
Koprol’s geolocation feature was added to assist those who are about to check in to a venue. Now Koprol can automatically offer the closest available venue and also lists places of interest that is currently popular in the area. As venue submissions must go into a vetting process, the chances of seeing multiple listings for a single venue is much lower than Foursquare’s.
By insisting on a web app, Koprol does not require approval from an application store’s screening process when it pushes a change to its system as it is able to provide an update to every user on any platform if and when they are ready to roll.
The latest addition to Koprol’s feature update is BUMP. As explained earlier, bump is the equivalent of Twitter’s native retweet. It allows the promotion of a message you see on your timeline to your followers who may or may not be following that person.
Apparently BUMP is short for Bring Up My Post. Clever people those Yahoos. Unfortunately in this early implementation of bump, if a post gets bumped by a number of people that you follow, you’ll see multiple instances of the bumped post instead of just one.
Slowly but surely Koprol is working its way to become a squarely solid service ahead of its planned jump to the international scene. With Vietnamese and Thai localizations under wraps, it’s mostly ready for regional expansion.
The service is already usable internationally as proven by Yahoo’s own Satya Witoelar and Michael Smith Jr. who’s been furiously checking in to various places between Jakarta and Sunnyvale during their trip to Yahoo’s head office this past week.
We’ll be closely watching this space as Koprol enters its third year of service in 2011.
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