When the iphone 3G first came out, one of the big promising areas was supposed to be location-aware social networks as evidenced by the release of native applications by Loopt and Whrrl among others. The fact is we’re still waiting for a revolution to happen. Maybe if everybody in the world had iPhones and also went through the trouble to install these apps, there’d be a fighting chance but otherwise you can’t expect much. Maybe if the Facebook iPhone app with their millions of users decided to leverage their presence to facilitate more location aware connection services but then again Facebook is a “social utility” and not a social network so they say.
The iPhone itself is not going to revolutionize location aware social networking. It certainly puts the internet in the pocket and spare batteries in your other pocket but location aware social services have quite a few challenges to overcome.
True Ubiquity
For any location based social network to succeed it has to be by definition available everywhere be it your desktop, cell phone, iPhone, PDA, etc. It could be browser based but then you need some way of making it aware of your location. The iPhone would be perfect for this if everyone had an iPhone but that’s unlikely to happen, unless you only roll with hardcore mac fans then it might mean something.
Push Notifications without being Pushy
Another difficulty with location awareness is that you and your circle are more or less on the move throughout the day. Location-based services need to get that information to your friends without it being overwhelming or irrelevant. It wouldn’t mean much to know that Jenny is looking to have casual drinks around Times Square when you crossed to New Jersey state line on the way home from work. Pushing information to the right users when they want it is more of a challenge than meets the eye. Making the service too tame means less opportunities for the social networks to have any meaning but too much means alienating your users.
Privacy
Knowing where someone is at any given moment poses all kinds of security risks unless you’re talking about close friends and/or colleagues where you have roughly the same amount of information on each other. If enough of your activity is logged people will eventually notice patterns whether they try to or not.
At the end of the day, we already have an ad hoc local social network, it’s called your office, your school, your home, and we have the ultimate social application for location aware networking also known as the cell phone. It’ll be hard for location based social networks to gain momentum on providing users real opportunities to reach out to others in the here and offer something that plain cell phones don’t.
Just tweeted a response to you, and then realized I could write quite a bit more in a comment than I could in a tweet.
So, for the last five years or so I’ve been working with a core group of folks developing a protocol which enables exactly what you are describing: > http://blipmessaging.com/ < From the summary:
“LLUP is a decentralized messaging protocol which facilitates the ability to broadcast notifications of the existence of time sensitive content related to a given subject matter, addressing this message to any person, place, or thing—potentially—without an immediate understanding ahead of time who the person, place, or thing might represent or apply to directly.”
... and a little further down the page under the “The Push/Pull Mechanism” heading:
“In the above example, while I might be subscribed to certain keywords, locales, and other topics of interest, due to the specific intent of the LLUP specification, a message is never pushed to anyone directly. Instead, the original message is pushed by its creator to an LLUP service provider where it is indexed and made available to be pulled via a subscription or direct search mechanism from those with interest in the related topics. In other words, the content of the message is only seen by those paying specific attention—whether in person, via a software notification mechanism, or through a real-time search—to the “radar screen” while this particular blip is in scope, based on its lifetime which is specified as part of the BLIP message. And it’s here that exists the key to understanding the primary focus of the LLUP specification:
Consumer discernment and choice as to what information they want to gain access to (the pull) while at the same time facilitating the ability for time sensitive information to extend it’s reach to people who would otherwise never know this information was available (the push.)”