Freeview: Pickup Sports

Location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla are all the rage these days. Mobile applications that find services or businesses near your GPS location come in handy when you’re in a pinch or get the itch to do something a little different wherever you are.

Pickup Sports by developer Peter Ma brings social networking to the playground by creating a handy (and free!) app for webOS that will search for pickup games near you. Let’s say you want to see if there is anyone interested in a quick game of basketball at a park near your location: you can fire up the app and begin a search by either zip code or GPS. If there are any games scheduled near you they will show up in the search results along with who else is joining, address of the park, type of sport, time and date. From here you can choose to join the game, or decline.

You can also create your own event with over fourteen sports to choose from including football, softball, basketball, running, tennis, and many more. Scheduling your game allows others to see your event once it’s submitted to the queue for the world to see.

Pickup sports isn’t without its faults. There is no option to select the radius of your search, so I was presented with games that were nearly 30 to 40 miles away at times. This leads to another problem with this sort of app: if nobody near you uses this service, most of your searches may come up empty.

According to the developer, the app is only available for webOS and Android devices at the moment. I’m pretty sure there are more Android users actively using the app than webOS users, but as for my recent searches I’ve found little if any games near me.

Interested? Go here to download Pickup Sports directly to your device!