Real Contact maps out BlackBerry Messenger contacts

Remember a while back when I asked you how precious your BlackBerry PIN was? I came across another service that expands upon the functionality of BlackBerry Messenger and potentially puts your PIN out there for the public to discover. Real Contact puts your BlackBerry Messenger users on the map, BlackBerry Maps to be exact, making them discoverable and locatable. Real Contact doesn’t make use of Google Maps, so make sure you have BlackBerry Maps installed (and BlackBerry Messenger 6, as well). The idea is to forgo the “Where are you?” messages and see how close your friends are to you.

Now while some of the information is pretty handy to have, some details that you see can be a little spooky; especially when you realize that others can see the same about you. If you’re worried about your own personal security, you can make your location and information as public, or private as you want it to be. Real Contact can also be used as a helpful reminder or notifier, as well. Contacts are displayed on the map, with their BlackBerry Messenger avatar showing up in a red or green marker (green indicates the contact is using the application, red indicates they are not). When looking at a contact on a map, you could potentially see detail such as; GPS coordinates, BlackBerry Messenger personal message, availability, signal strength and battery level. I guess that you can’t use the excuse “I can’t talk, my phone is about to die” anymore, especially if the other person can see you still have 83% power left.

Besides that, you can also set notifications when you are nearing a specific contact, address or when a contact is nearing you. This may help take the guessing game out of wondering when they will arrive. A contacts location is captured and relayed every 100 meters. Notifications go even further when you can set the application to let you know if a contact is busy, unavailable, finished with their phone call or has completed a calendar appointment- If you’re comfortable with sharing that type of information. It’s crazy how intuitive your contacts now seem to be, they’ll know the right moment to contact you and also know where you are. Not too shabby for a free service. You can download the application for free from BlackBerry App World.

More information/download Real Contact for BlackBerry smartphones