All the hottest location-sharing services use some sort of gaming element to get users hooked, but will we ever be 100% comfortable with people knowing where we are?
As the number of services that let us share our locations increases, it’s apparent that most of the more popular one use a gimmick that encourages us to let everyone know where we currently are.
Just look at Foursquare’s leaderboard and mayor deals, Gowalla’s collectable items and Waze’s ‘Road Goodies’. Most of the big names in geolocation are using games to get us used to sharing.
It’s understandable that these gimmicks are required – very few people are comfortable with publicly sharing where they currently are. Give someone the chance to become ‘Mayor’ of their local corner shop and they’re more likely to open up to the idea to broadcasting their location.
The trouble with the current crop of location-based games is that they’re quite unsophisticated. Collecting items around a real world map or becoming the ‘mayor’ of somewhere just because you go there a lot are hollow victories. Sooner or later people will get bored of Foursquare, Gowalla and their ilk. What happens then?
Certainly there will be another generation of more advanced location-sharing games in time, but will people ever get used to just sharing their location without the sweetener of gaming glory?
Pure location-sharing services like Brightkite and Google Latitude have yet to gain traction and very few people have as-yet started using Twitter’s geolocation service regularly to tag their tweets with their location. At the time of writing, of the past two hours of tweets from the 1300 early adopters and geeks that I follow, none of them are location tagged. Many of these people are using geolocation-enabled apps like Tweetie 2 or Twidroid – they’re just not using the feature.
While the technology is there to let people know where we are at all times, will we ever actually want to do that unless it’s part of a game? It would be a pretty significant change in human definitions of privacy to be confortable with people knowing where we are at all times. What could kickstart a change in that direction?
A post over at TechCrunch recently suggested that Facebook will change everything.When Facebook finally gets around to adding location-sharing features it will open up the possibilities to a much more mainstream audience than start-ups like Foursquare and Gowalla can currently touch.
The question is this: even if location sharing is easy to do with Facebook, will users ever get over the lingering fear that they’ll be stalked and killed or that their house will be burgled while they’re out? They’re both reasonable fears and I believe we’ll get over them in time, but don’t expect your Great Aunt Maude to be sharing her location online this time next year… unless she wants to become mayor of the old folks’ home.
[Image modified from an original by The Fayj]
Sharing my present location must make sense and give me some value. Gaming and adhoc community building might be a good reason for many of us. All the rest of us will greatly benefit by better search results and by the next new wave of magnetic data delivery. We will attract semantic data agents like we did attract old fashioned sales men to our doorsteps.
For my two cents, almost. I enjoy the game aspect much more than the data that I get from it.
A
Hi Ari, I think location review sites are different to public broadcasting of a live location. People are happy to review places they’ve been (and incidentally, a Google acquisition of Yelp hasn’t been formally announced -yet). It sound like what you want is more people to use Google Latitude, which already provides a social layer to Google Maps.
My favorite location sharing service is reQall. reQall gives me location based relevant reminders in a timely manner. This service is getting more and more sophisticated and delivering great value.
I disagree that Facebook will change everything, for the bulk of its non-Twitter users think Twitter is irritating and annoying. I’ve polled my friends and other social media folks polled their friends; and the answers are universal.
Rather, I think the game-changer, pardon my pun, will occur in the wake of the announced $500 million acquisition of Yelp by Google. It’s the next generation of Google Maps…and could potentially give Foursquare, Gowalla, etc a run for their money.
I’m a Foursquare user and while it’s cool to be the mayor of a pub, I also like to see where my local friends are checking in. What would be neater is to view, on a mobile level, multiple checks-in together in the way Adium and Trillian allow you to see multiple IM clients in the same view.
Twitter. No web UI. Very few location aware apps. Those that are, are almost all read only. Getagging defaulted off. And you wonder why it has FAILed?
Stupid, Craigslist style, City based systems. US Only or at least not global from day one. iPhone only. Lack of APIs. Lack of RSS/Atom. Firefox-Chrome with no inherent IE or Safari support. Stupidly hard to just say “I’m here”. Restricted by ridiculous regional specific copyright or licensing deals (See UK Postcodes for example). These are just some of the many failings of the most well known Geo-location apps. And you wonder why so far they’ve FAILed?
Must admit I did not even know Tweetie 2 was geolocation-enabled… :)
That said, nope, the risk of getting some real wacko on my heels in the physical world IS a fear I have keeping me off these services. Also, Gowalla seems to be really addictive and a great application overall, so I am also afraid of getting hooked… :)
Interesting perspective, Martin. Definitely different levels of comfort with location-sharing. Seems to me people like to have more control over this information if they’re going to do it — e.g. facebooking or tweeting what they’re up to and then giving more details if a friend comments back and says, hey I’m nearby.
Very new to Forusquare, but don’t you think the success of it and the other location sharing games depend on how companies and orgs choose to get involved? For instance, if I know I can visit a brand, see friend’s reviews but also interact with the brand of maybe even gain access to a deal, I’m more likely to invest the time.
Just my initial POV. What do you think?
There’s two things needed for location sharing to take off in a big way.
1. It must be able to be done in the background. If I have to “check-in”, then eventually I’m going to get tired of doing it and stop doing it. No amount of gaming will make this last forever.
No, it’ll have to be set and have the phone do it by itself, without my intervention.
2. Privacy is paramount. I have to feel that I have total and complete control over who can see my location. This must be clearly built in from the start, with many warnings before making any location “public”.
For example, one feature that is needed is a privacy bubble. I need the ability to define a location, like my house, where it will not report, or where it will report only to a limited number of people. I don’t mind people seeing when I’m at the local bar, but perhaps I don’t want the world to know where I live or work, etc.
Facebook could kill this space, easily, however they’ve not been focused much on privacy lately. Quite the opposite, in fact, so I think they’ll screw it up. Badly.
Nice post Martin,
We (http://flook.it) certainly agree with you. There is much more to location that “I’m here”. It’s a great feature but it is just a feature. When we were designing flook we had a lot of ideas about how we could integrate location sharing. It’s still something we plan to do long term but it isn’t a priority. There is a lot more information relevant to a location than my immediate location. I think longer term the location sharing services must realise this or their users will suffer from fatigue.
I think that the same argument from the other end means that adding location to (say) facebook does not invalidate other location services any more than the fact that Yelp already includes location means there is no need for other location aware service.
Location is a game changer – it ties all computing (especially mobile) computing to the real world and I believe the successful apps will be as varied (and numerous) as the real world is.
rog
Ambient Industries
Hi Justin, brand involvement will certainly ‘legitimise’ the idea of location sharing for some people, I think. Foursquare and Gowalla have great potential for cross-promotion with brands in 2010 and it will be interesting to see how that plays out.