While these location-based services (LBS) are useful in their own ways, none of them might be as adept at sharing specific locations from mobile phones and the web as Zhiing, which is officially launching Wednesday on the iPhone, Android, Symbian, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile platforms. In a nutshell, Zhiing cuts out the fat to solve one important problem: telling people where exactly you are quickly.
Using Zhiing
Zhiing, at the core, is a mobile IM that sends your exact location to others. Say you're meeting a client at a restaurant and want to ping your business partner to come. Instead of awkwardly figuring out where you are and sending the name of the restaurant and the location, you just send a message to your friend (via your address book or their phone number). It will then appear in their Zhiing inbox or, if they don't have the app, in the form of a text message. This makes it easy to send a Zhiing to anyone.
What if you want to send the address of a tweetup from a website? Luckily, one of the thing that stands out with Zhiing is its browser plugin for Firefox and IE. The plugin is similar to Skype's extensions, which turn any phone number you find on the Web into a link that launches a Skype phone call. Zhiing's plugin places an icon near any address it finds. Clicking it opens up a simple menu that allows you to send the address to any friend via Zhiing or text.
What Zhiing Is and What It's Not
Zhiing may seem like a simple application, but it has incredible implications and potential. Zhiing is scary-accurate: according to the company, they not only utilize GPS, but triangulation to better pinpoint where you are. Zhiing can be used to create geofences or just to send yourself the location of a great restaurant you just discovered.