As a child of the 80s, I grew up with a lot of slang adverbs to describe something or somewhere that was really ‘wicked’, mainly gleaned from Will Smith in the Fresh prince of Bel Air; a skateboard was described as ‘kicking’, a friend’s haircut could be ‘jumping’, my Mum’s cooking was ‘smoking’ (she didn’t like that one), but the latest social event-sharing app to appear on my iPhone, ItsPoppingHere!, wins hands down in terms of a cool descriptiveness. I took it for spin and found out where was ‘popping’ in my local area.
The app itself is very easy to navigate, its smooth interface very swipe-able and the process in which it takes to load is pretty quick.. So far, so good. As with many social networking apps, you can create an account with an email and password, or, more preferably, you can log in with Facebook and Twitter, which opens up more options for you in terms of sharing and posting your events and findings.
The crux of the app is simple; find a place that’s ‘popping’ (or, indeed, not ‘popping’, but more of that later) and tag it by using the built-in geo-localization tool of Google Maps, write a quick review and give it a star rating with a photo attached to give other users a heads up as to the coolest places in town. Other users will then search for the best venues in the area and hopefully check out the hottest (or poppest?) places.
Categories for venues are split up into the obvious classifications: Restaurants, Nightclubs, Concerts, Bars, Sports Events, etc. However, what really impressed me is the fact that you can hone your searches dependent on a mile-measured radius. Don’t fancy paying for a taxi? Reduce the distance to an easy mile’s stroll. Fancy driving to the restaurant? Maximize your search to get the hottest diner within a 10-mile circle of your current location.
With other place-rating apps such as FourSquare, the more users that rate places, the more accurate the ranking will be; let’s say that you walk past a bar and it looks pretty dead, your low score will only greatly affect its ranking if you are one of the first to discover it. This ‘mean average’ way of scoring is posited to be the fairest way to decide on a venue’s overall ranking. However, this doesn’t really capture the point of the ephemeral nature of a night out; how can you guarantee that a place is going to be ‘popping’ unless you are actually there? This is why ItsPoppingHere! deletes its reviews, rankings and photos just eight hours after they are submitted, to maintain freshness and a constant stream of, well, ‘pop’.
I think that this is a revolutionary idea and it puts the pressure on venues to be constantly ‘popping’, which is exactly what a paying public deserves. The fact that you also have to be within a certain distance of the venue means that there will be no fake reviews from dodgy promoters.
The app has already built up a lot of kudos from the blogging world and it is going to continue to gather steam as long as people keep posting where’s popping, so download your copy for free, get out there and LIVE LIFE! You know that Will Smith would.
Follow ItsPoppingHere! on Twitter and on Facebook to keep up with the hottest venues near you.
