ThomasPurves.com - Where are we? Mobile Geolocation and Social Presence

7 May 2007

Someone at a party the other night was trying to explain what you could do with geolocation on your phone. The conventional wisdom is, it would be "great" because if you are standing on street corner your phone could tell you the nearest pizza restaurant. Or it blink at you with "offers" from the nearest pizza restaurant.

No, I said, the killer app is not about where I am, it's where my friends are. Sure, often times we don't want to run in to each other, but sometimes we do. And when we do, it would be great to see who from my buddy list (my real buddy list) might be nearby and we could ping each other, want to meet up? or hey, the movie is about to start are you almost here? where are you?

We try to do this manually with social presence apps with twitter, or for the truly brave plazes. Once it gets easy enough, "social location" services will be huge, and may just be the missing piece in social presence we've been wondering about.

David Coleman is thinking about similar matters in his Collaborative Strategies blog. He ponders both the business value of such tools as well as the business model Twitter is using. (He also points out that the vastly more popular Facebook is now offering similar abilities.)

I go along with David's observation that "Personally, I don't want someone to know where I am or what I am doing every minute of every day." I sometimes amaze people by steadfastly continuing to talk to them even though my telephone - mobile or fixed - is ringing. (We are so conditioned to allow machines to intrude on our affairs that they see this as unusual, almost aberrant, behaviour.)

So, like David, I'm finding it hard to imagine how such geolocational tools would make much of a business contribution. No doubt I'll think of some significant uses in due course. Meanwhile, the Luddite side of me is winning this internal debate.