Fresh off signing up user number 500,000, SCVNGR is out with a new release of its iPhone and Android mobile apps. The new apps focus on social improvements and better surface place activity happening across both SCVNGR and Facebook.
The 3.5 release, internally referred as “Vulcan,” is a drastic reinterpretation of the SCVNGR service. While the core features have remained intact, the new apps tout a sophisticated dashboard layout, map-based views, activity grouped by visits, comments and post ratings.

Most noticeable, at least in a superficial fashion, is the new dashboard layout. SCVNGR has reorganized the application experience into buckets: Friends Feed, Profile, Friends, Badges, Places, Rewards, Treks, Social Map and Settings.

Functionality wise, we’re most impressed with the reworked activity stream in the Friends Feed section. User activity is now grouped into visits, so all checkins, photos, challenges and all the rest are grouped together by user, by place. You can also now leave a comment or select to “+1 this.” A “+1″ on SCVNGR would be your way of showing approval for a friend’s post; the action also rewards the friend with an additional point.

The Social Map is also worth a good hard look. The startup has been able to surface your Facebook friend’s Places checkins ever since it introduced deep integration with Facebook Places. The Social Map visualizes that integration, plotting the whereabouts of both your Facebook and SCVNGR friends. You can also zoom in and out on the map, and adjust the time scale to zero in on what your friends are up to right now.

You’d be right in recognizing the similarities between SCVNGR’s new design and the design of the Facebook iPhone app. The startup is using the Three20 Project framework for iPhone, originally developed by Joe Hewitt for Facebook and then open sourced.

In a candid conversation with Mashable, SCVNGR founder and CEO Seth Priebatsch also shared that the startup has successfully managed to monetize its location-based mobile game. “I guarantee we’re making more money than anyone else in the space, by an order of magnitude,” says Priebatsch.

The startup doesn’t publicly share current revenue numbers, but we do know that it made $1 million in 2009 — before the consumer apps existed — and that it’s making “many many multiples of that this year,” according to Priebatsch. He says SCVNGR made more money in the first three days of October then it did in all of September.

SCVNGR 3.5 Screenshots


Dashboard



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Friends Feed



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Place Map



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Places



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Rewards



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Social Map



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Reviews: Facebook, Mashable
More About: android, facebook, geolocation, iphone, scvngr

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