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"Social discovery apps were widely hailed as the next big thing at SXSW earlier this year, with attendees honing in on a handful of startups like Highlight, Sonar, Glancee and Banjo, all of which used GPS data and information from social networks to locate potential contacts nearby.\nIn the months since then, the buzz for social discovery apps has largely died down and each of these startups has taken a different approach to adapt. Sonar, for example, has focused on adding features that let users find and interact with people they actually know rather than strangers. Meanwhile,\u00A0Highlight\u00A0is working on ways to help users find out more relevant information about people who are nearby.\nBanjo, on the other hand, has opted to expand on its original formula for social discovery apps by providing tools to\u00A0discover what your connections are doing in specific locations elsewhere in the world, rather than just nearby. The startup launched a promising feature in July called \"trending places,\" which promised to help users hone in on social media updates from people at specific events they'd like to be at like the Olympics.\nNow, Banjo is expanding on that idea with a complete overhaul of its iPhone and Android apps.\nThe redesigned Banjo, which rolls out on Thursday, helps users quickly discover tweets, photos and check-ins from friends and connections anywhere in the world, rather than just the place where they are right now. The trending places feature has been renamed \"personalized places\" and highlights the most popular cities where your friends and friends of friends are posting from at the moment. Users can also search for any city or venue to find real-time social media updates from there.\n\"The older Banjo focused on a map of where you are right now. The new Banjo focuses on where in the world your friends and friends of friends are right now,\"\u00A0Damien Patton, Banjo's founder, told\u00A0Mashable.\nWith these new features, users can find out which friends are traveling in a city they want to visit, search for updates from an airport or football stadium, and filter results for a specific spot by keywords like \"Apple\" or \"Obama\" in to see what people are saying about it on the ground.\nBanjo, which now has more than 3 million users, will continue to highlight people nearby based on the user's connections on a number of social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. However, this feature, which the company's CEO refers to as the \"here functionality,\" is now just one part of the app rather than the central focus.\n\"The here functionality is a feature, not a company. Users will just demand it like they do with SMS on a phone,\" Patton says. \"It's not something that will keep a user coming back constantly.\"\nImage courtesy of Banjo; thumbnail image courtesy of iStockPhoto, alengo."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2012/11/15/banjo-app-update/>