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Loopt bills itself as a social compass for your mobile phone. The service lets your phone identify your physical location so that your friends know when you're near them, you can easily let people know where you are, and you can share content on your phone, such as photos, with others.

You can let anybody seen your location, but you also have the ability to make it visible to only a select group of friends/contacts or to no one. (You must have SMS text messaging and data charges will apply.)

Loopt has partnerships with Sprint, Nextel, Boost, Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile. Use it with Windows Mobile or BlackBerry phones and, soon, iPhones (it may not be available for every device yet).

Control Your Loopt
With Loopt technology potentially identifying your whereabouts (or the whereabouts of the teenager who has absconded with your phone) to the world, some knowledge of how to turn off its beacon could be helpful.

You can access your Loopt settings either from the application on your mobile device or from the Loopt site on your computer. If things go really haywire, you can even call a customer service number and have the settings changed.

The Loopt "visibility mode" icon will always indicate whether your phone is sharing your location so you don't have to wade through the software to figure it out. You may have to wrestle with your adolescent to get a view of it, but at least you know what to look for.

As with other social networking tools, Loopt reminds users to only accept friend requests from trusted sources.