A new app for Apple’s super-popular iPhone lets you share your coffee fix with the world and helps you find the nearest café no matter where you are.

Just when it seemed Apple’s iPhone couldn’t get any more attractive, the UK’s Kisky Netmedia has launched CoffeeBuzz, a interactive app that lets users share their coffee with their iPhone friends. Inspired by Twitter’s ability to let you stream your activities to friends who are also using the application, CoffeeBuzz uses Google maps to enhance your coffee-drinking experience.

Think of it as a GPS system for your next caffeine fix. CoffeeBuzz:

– Tracks the nearest coffee shop based on your location
– Shows other CoffeeBuzz users’ recent locations and activity near the cafes they’ve visited
– Allows you to add your favorite coffee hangouts to share with other users
– Updates your Twitter status with your coffee-centric activities

“We made Coffee Buzz because we love iPhone and we love coffee. We know loads of our friends microblog that they’re ‘having a coffee’ and we always wanted to know more. Coffee Buzz makes that possible; you can ‘tweet’ your favorite coffee from your favorite café; and share that ‘coffee social’ buzz,” said Paul Stinger, CoffeeBuzz’s creator.

Stinger and his Liverpool-based team have cheekily priced the app the same as what you’d pay for your favorite latte: $3.99 (or £2.39 if you’re a Brit like Stringer). The app’s icon looks just like the ubiquitous white go-cups found at every coffee shop and waits cutely on your phone’s main menu until you’re ready to let it help you find the nearest café. I don’t know about you, but that would be temptation enough for me to click on it!

A buzz-worthy idea

Stringer and his business partner, Katie Lips, created Kisky Netmedia and specialize in developing social media and mobile strategy. For them, the CoffeeBuzz app happened while they were busy working on a report to show off the iPhone’s multi-faceted abilities as part of a report for the International Centre for Digital Content at Liverpool’s John Moores University.

In order to better understand an iPhone app from its concept to sale, Stringer and Lips decided to create one themselves. Lips’ love for coffee – she says she drinks around four double shot Americanos per day, made at home on her own espresso machine – made an app based around the drink an easy choice. Lips writes in her “The making of CoffeeBuzz” report that the coffee you’re drinking says a lot about you, and thus she and Stringer brought in their idea of “coffee blogging” to round out the app’s uses with Twitter.

I don’t own an iPhone, but what I love about this app is that it brings people together. As Lips says in her report, you can find a friend having coffee 500 miles away or one just up the block that you go and join.

Just add coffee, mix with the twitter of friendly conversation, stir and enjoy.

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