|
Location Aware Social Networks are Coming on Strong. Thanks to rich mobile devices, people are increasingly untethered from the desktop- and this has more potential impact than just participating in a Facebook or Twitter stream on the go. For organizations, here are some of the potential impacts of Location Aware nets: - Bridges the online/offline gap: creates "ambient awareness" of who's near you.This can be filtered by intimates, friends, people like me, people with similiar interests, or turned off completely for privacy.Ambient discovery encourages new conversations, and new connections.It also has the potential to be incredibly annoying.
- Reinforces the Wisdom of Crowds (or, conversely, encourages Lemming Like behavior): Applications such as CitySense can scrub the activity data, build a baseline and then benchmark current behavior- for example- are the night clubs in San Francisco busy or slow tonight?CitySense asserts that can help one decide whether to go out or not.Shared tagging services, such as Foursquare or GoWalla or even Yelp mobile, encourage users to respect what other people are saying/have said in the past.
- Reinforces immediate feedback and service requirements:You had better really care about the customer experience, because now, you will live or die by it, in a very short while.As these become more pervasive, and one has a choice between 2 cafes in a radius, and Foursquare says one is good, and the other one has dirty bathrooms, you know which one is going to win. If a band is hopping, the doors will burst at the seams.If the lines are long and the service bad, people will go elsewhere.
- Provides micro platforms to advertise, coupon or sponsor: Your location effectively becomes a search term- passively entered, it provides collaboratively filtered results- you are shown things near you in real time that may be relevant to you in the moment. A business can take advantage of this by creating offerings on these platforms that target users interests, appetites, promotional items, overstocks or expiring inventory- or even time of day.Whrrl from Pelago has partnered to create a location aware couponing/shopping service, as one example of communicating with your device.
- Creates "collective situational awareness": A potentially huge positive impact of location aware devices includes the ability to triangulate around a situation- a fire, a natural disaster, a lost child- with inputs coming based on location in real time. From a public saftey and urban planning standpoint, can also provide great data on people movement.
As a business or nonprofit, you can actively encourage mobile opinion leaders to check-in on their mobile, to share their recommendations and to connect with you in person. For example, if you're doing location specific events or conferences, you can reach out to people in the immediate area on these networks to draw in foot traffic. You might consider adding your twitter name, location, etc to print materials and signage. Might run promotions to members of these networks, on the networks themselves or on Twitter. You might get involved in these communities. Most important? Just create a great experience and it might happen on the natural. That's what P2P networks rely on, anyway.
The Top Location Aware Social Networks
From the end user perspective we've tried all of these services. Many are specifically tied to the iPhone or to Android, some offer a way to participate on the Blackberry or Palm, or even over SMS or email. Foursquare seems to have pulled away from the pack in the last month- with strong traffic growth reported on Compete.com and Alexa. Almost all are directly integrated to Facebook and Twitter. From the All Life is a Game department, we really like Foursquare, too- more inclusive, not tied to iPhone, badges, games, points and more focused on experience sharing than review or critique. Gowalla's look and feel is good, too, and they have broader coverage, but something about Foursquare seems to strike the right personal tone. 
 From the top services, in their own words: Citysense
Citysense was built to show you where the action is, right now. Citysense analyzes massive amounts of aggregate, anonymous location data in real-time. Macrosense is already being used by business people for things like selecting store locations and understanding retail demand. But we asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city? Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer. This release is just a test, and we're interested in your feedback on how to make the application better. You'll find a feedback button in Citysense. Using a billion points of GPS and WiFi positioning data from the last few years – plus real-time feeds – Citysense sees S.F. from above and puts the top live hotspots in your hand. You don't even need to sign up, just go to citysense.com on your BlackBerry, download, and open. When you use Citysense, the application learns about the kinds of places you like to go from GPS – without ever sharing that information. In its next release, Citysense will not only tell you where everyone is right now, but where everyone like YOU is right now. The application will compare your history and preferences with those of other users, and show you where you're most likely to find people with similar tastes at that moment. So each person's nightlife map will look a little different, and will display a unique top hotspot list. Cool, huh? That's why we save your location when you use Citysense: to remember what you like. Of course, you don't have to keep a personalized nightlife profile. You can delete your data from our system anytime you want. You created your data: you own it. But showing up in Chicago for the first time and seeing the top places you're likely to find people with similar tastes as yourself at midnight – that's pretty useful. Foursquare Share your experiences with friends : Think of foursquare as an "urban mix tape." We'll help you make lists of your favorite things to do and let you share them with friends. Think beyond your standard review - we're looking less for "The food here is top notch" and more for "Go to Dumont Burger and try the most amazing Mac and Cheese ever. Foursquare will keep track of the things you've done, help you create To-Do lists and even suggest new experiences to seek out. As you check-in around the city, you'll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After checking-in at a restaurant, it's not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu. Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is discoverable by other users just by checking-in. Gypsii GyPSii® connects people, places and communities across networks and devices, from work to play to home, enabling members to share their real life experiences in the virtual world on your mobile phone and the internet. GyPSii® allows you to social network, capture, tag and share your content and places. Explore location based content, services and points of interest, find people, your friends and content in your select communities, connect your experiences, locate and map your friends and places. Explore lives from all over the world or just in your local area!
Get the latest updates on places, friends & your community. Let people know what you doing & where! - Create Places
- Locate Friends & Their Places:
- Explore
Easily invite your friends to join your GyPSii community - GyPSii CONNECT: - allows gypsii members to share their latest status, places created and newest friends in real time across other social networks.
- allows you to update your status on GyPSii or another social network of choice and to share it across all your networks in real time.
- connect your social network of choice on GyPSii CONNECT and start sharing across your other networks immediately, on your FaceBook profile and twitter profile.
Loopt
Loopt shows users where friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Loopt helps friends connect on the fly and navigate their social lives by orienting them to people, places and events. Users can also share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs. Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy controls. Pelago: Whrrl & Whrrl v2.0
Whrrl is a location-based application that leverages your social network to help you discover new adventures in the real world. Whrrl shows you where your friends are right now, what they’re doing, and where they have been. You can discover new places to go based on where your friends go, whether it’s in your town or a new place. Whrrl is available on a web browser, via SMS, or as an application on your mobile phone. Whrrl v2.0 is a storytelling application for the web and mobile phone that lets people share and remember their real-world experiences as they happen. Everyone – whether physically present or not – can contribute to the experience. Stories can be published to Facebook and Twitter, and the storyteller controls who can view and participate.
|
Analysis 
