The Limited Appeal of Location-Based Services. (Uh-oh, Foursquare and Gowalla)
This year's SXSW festival was all about "location services," or mobile applications that let users "check in" to bars, restaurants and events and broadcast that information to friends. Foursquare, Gowalla, BrightKite, MyTown and legions of other location-based startups were all there to showcase their respective ideas about how to make GPS and social networking into something fun and useful.
The common sentiment seems to be that location-based networking is merely in its incipience, with a boom waiting in the wings. In a recent editorial on TechCrunch, one of the founders of SimpleGeo, a geolocation infrastructure company, went so far as to call location services a burgeoning "gold rush." "Location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so," the piece says. By the dozens of startups at SXSW, that observation would be hard to argue.
Some of these services are already very popular -- Loopt (pictured at right) reportedly has over a million users. Never ones to be left in the dust, big players like Facebook and Google (GOOG) are tacking location layers on top of their existing services. Apple (AAPL) has filed for a patent that for an unannounced service called iGroups, which seems to be a kind of social-networking-via-GPS thing that allows people to link up with other users nearby.
But to compare location to social media is something of a false dichotomy: location apps are more limited and more bizarre. I'm not saying they aren't fun; I've been using Foursquare and MyTown, two game-like location apps, to great amusement. But unlike, say, Facebook, these services have inherently limited appeal. Dennis Crowley, one of Foursquare's founders, pointed this out to me in a book interview last year; he noted that Foursquare's market was limited essentially to cities. And not just cities, but walking cities. Why? Checking in at a bar or restaurant doesn't have much purpose in a town with only a handful of businesses, and even in a big city like Los Angeles, the real-time aspect is, to some degree, lost; it's not too useful to know where your friends are if there's an intervening 30-minute car ride to go meet them. (For Web users in non-walking cities, location services will be simpler; geo-tagging a Flickr image or tweet, or sharing roadtrip progress on Glympse.)
For the urban users, the biggest challenge will seem to be choosing which service(s) to keep up with among the many. But in reality, there is plenty of multifarious weirdness waiting in the wings. One aspect of these services is that they link you, by time and place, to other users, meaning that when you hang out with Friend A on Friday night, Friend B can see (via Foursquare) that you were both together. I'm not much of a privacy hawk, but those kinds of details can breed a whole new kind of social complexity that some of us might not be prepared for.
Of course, users know this data is being broadcast, which is why they occasionally falsify it. On the backend, Foursquare's engineers can see when someone fakes a check-in, presumably to throw other users off their trail. Right now, their system doesn't penalize a user for being in one place and reporting another, but the phenomenon raises an interesting question: what's the point of reporting your location if you're merely using it as an alibi?
Another byproduct of a swell in location apps will be the effect all this self-referential data can have on our behavior. Gowalla, for example, sees itself as being a kind of "highlight reel" for a given user's life, providing data about where the user goes (and who they're with) in aggregate. The great potential here, Gowalla's CEO says, is visualization: being able to look through your check-in history and see the patterns of your own life. While that does sound kind of appealing, it smacks a little of the same kind of terror that haunts, say, the mapping of your own genome; by seeing your behavior in aggregate, you may be presented with some information you'd rather not have. Perhaps you realize that you go out to dinner more than you go to the gym, or that you spend more time with your colleagues than with your spouse. It's easy to assume that aggregate data about your own life is mere novelty, like seeing an X-ray of your own teeth. But it also has the potential to stultify your daily sense of chance or free will.
Social networking had some of these concerns, too. "Friending" someone visibly linked you with that person, as did posting on their "wall" or advertising a "relationship status." But location based services have the potential to put a very fine point on these relationships, adding colorful vectors like frequency, date and time, and establishment. Prepare for the "gold rush" of location, then -- but cautiously.