Microsoft’s Bing team took the wraps off of a new location-sharing application for Windows Phone on Thursday called “We’re in.” The application is similar to foursquare and Latitude in some respects, and yet still very different. The idea is simple: you can create an invitation that will allow your friends to share their location for a specified amount of time. Say, for example, you want to share your location and see where four of your friends are, for one hour, while you all head towards a local restaurant. You can create a quick event with “We’re in” and then send it to those friends. Once they accept, their pictures and locations will appear on Bing Maps. If you hit traffic or the train is late, you and your friends can update your status as you make your way to the restaurant.

Unlike Latitude, which some people avoid for fear of location privacy issues, you can always leave the party. Better yet, when the allotted time is up, your location is automatically turned off. The application is available in the Zune Marketplace now and Microsoft says it plans on delivering it to other platforms soon, too.


We’re In makes organizing get- together’s, carpooling and trying to find people in a crowd a breeze. Any time you want to see where your friends are—We're In can help you. It's simple, invite your friends, and when they join, they'll see your location and you'll see theirs. When the invite expires, so does the shared location – no complicated process to worry about.

We’re In is a great way to save time and frustration when planning your roadtrip or meeting your friend at the mall – helping you connect with your friend faster. Let’s take a closer look at the new We’re In product features and how they work.

We’ve made We’re In super simple to use – all you need is your phone number to sign up. Simply invite your friends (via your contacts) to start sharing location info with each other including who, why, and how long:



Pick your friends from the contact list or enter their phone number, tell them what the plan is. At this point you can choose how long you want to share location info.

Your friends receive a text message with these details. They can use the app to join you or, for friends that don't have a Windows Phone, they can join from the mobile website via the invite.

Seeing your friends on the map

As each of your friends joins you, their locations appear on the map. If you need to you can pan, pinch and stretch the map to see more or fewer of them. Everyone that joins can see everyone else's location.


You can also update your status message to let your friends know what's going on (you're on your way, you're going to be late, the first round has just arrived, important stuff they need to know). To see someone's most recent status message, just tap their user tile on the map. To see status messages for everyone that's joined, go to the People tab.

To stop sharing your location info at any time, just tap "leave" on the People tab. If you want, you can send them a status message to let them know that you're leaving

And when the time is up, the invite expires and location sharing stops. You don't need to do anything.

“We’re In” is available as a Windows Phone application. We’re working on bringing this app to more devices, so stay tuned!
Philomena Lobo – Product Manager, Bing Maps & Bing Mobile
Shira Weinberg – Program Manager, Bing Mobile