Location based services are for me going to be one of the next big things in the digital space. The only thing is I’m not sure when! I’ve been following the area closely since I heard about Loopt 9 months ago. In the online advertising business we always say in January “this is going to be the year for Mobile”, and it never is. These two fields are inextricably linked and as soon as the latter gets critical mass then so will the former.
So what is a location based service. It is a service (i.e. social networking) accessible through mobile devices that utilises the ability to geographically triangulate the device location anywhere in the globe, i.e. on your Facebook news feed, imagine seeing, “Joe Bloggs is in Leicester Square, London”. Social Networking is going to be the thing that drives this. Kids at school, people lost at festivals, mates in the vicinity, the possibilities are endless. But the possibilities also extend in so many commercial ways that brands with retail presences must be liking their lips at the very thought. Then there’s this idea of social graffiti, i.e. leaving geo-tags on restaurants, shops, etc, that your friends can see, share and comment on. Imagine I want to go to a local restaurant, call it up on Google Maps, and I see a menu from the restaurant, and comments left from 3 of my friends who have been there. We all know that recommendations are that much more influential if they are from your friends. Applications like Brightkite are already doing this in a simplistic way, check out the video below.
The barriers to this service are wide ranging and entwined with all sorts of legal / privacy concerns. We saw the backlash start with the launch of Google Latitude and then continued with the Facebook privacy row. Google Latitude is a location based service that can be installed on most new smartphones, although notably not the iPhone at present. Google obviously have a vested interest in this sort of technology with their complementary product portfolio of namely Maps, Android and Gmail. However for once it’s not going to be Google that drives this. Whilst there are a multitude of services out there like Loopt, Brightkite, etc, the growth is going to come from the established social networks. You can bet that Facebook and MySpace have Silicon Valley’s finest working on this functionality in readiness. To bring this to the mainstream you have to have an established network of friends in place already.
So until Facebook pull their fingers out and get on with it, we can dream. The Tonchidot, Sekai Camera is one such example. Premiered at TechCrunch50 this App stole the show and although the designers seem a little thin on how they are going to populate this augmented reality experience it is clearly a vision of the future. Enjoy…!