What is the future of location based social networking? Location is the most important part of real estate and in baseball it’s the difference between a Cy Young award winner and a minor leaguer. It’s also something that is making it’s way to most mobile phones and conceivably laptop computers someday. The benefits are vast, and benefit all sorts of users; including regular people, advertisers, gov’t intelligence officials, and stalkers, all in very different ways. Some benefits are pretty damn cool, some are pretty damn scary.
There are many sides of the equation, such as; i have friends and i want to see what they’re doing, maybe I’ll hang out with them right now, i’m a stalker and i want to be a creep, i’m a gov’t and i want to follow my citizens, and i’m an advertiser and i want to spend my money wisely with smart call to actions. All sides need to be addressed for the location based social web to take off, which it will someday.
Existing location based social web apps exist for the iphone right now. All of them have their advantages, some range from neat story-telling with people you don’t know at the place that you’re at, see where my friends are now, play a game based on the location, or see what else is around me. I like all of them for different reasons. I hate all of them because whenever I use them there is no benefit to me. None of my friends are on there, at least the ones that live in my city that I hang out with. It’s only a matter of time.
These social networks are going to take off this way, by focusing on shared experiences and shared events where a lot of tech savvy people are going to be present and leveraging existing mature social networks for promotion. Facebook and Twitter are great, but the problems they need to focus on are very different from the features that these location based networks are focused on. It’s a big area of opportunity. Hashtags are great on Twitter, but they aren’t the final answer.
This is going to be a fun area of the internet to pay attention to.
Overall, it’s going to be awesome technology. Unfortunately, there will be a piece of our population that will further isolate themselves from reality. We’re already victims (or are we benefitting?) of wearing our iPod earbuds and shutting out the rest of the world. Now we’re going to be looking down, staring at our iPhone screens for our friends, when we could be opening our eyes to the world around us.
Are these location based social apps making us more or less social?
Totally agree, in some regards. Technology is like any other tool. It all comes down to how you choose to use it. You can distance yourself from the rest of the world or bring yourself closer. Technology always gives us oiptions, it’s up to us to decide how to use them.