June 26, 2004
Cellphone Location Sharing

After doing research on locative technology I found this tidbit about services like dodgeball and whoat (whoa-tee) that try to introduce people to each other by alerting them to people close to them geographically.

"The key difference between online and location-based mobile social networking is the fourth dimension - time. Online it's relatively easy to get critical mass , as I just need to recuit some like-minded people. In a mobile context, I need to recruit them AND have enough of them that they'll be in certain places at certain times. Mathematically (though I have no idea how to prove this!) it's going to be incredibly less likely that you'll find someone by adding this new dimension." [mobile-blog]

images.jpgInteresting. What these services seem to lack is passive locative signaling. It's one thing to be punching into your cellphone "I'm at the corner of 1st and Main St" verses your cellphone broadcasting the information to a server which controls who is able to access your information, which is much more close to a GPS service.

Cellphones likely will become the new GPS, with embedded GPS chips, and more sophisticated management of your tracklogs, geo-images, and social network. While locative technology is cool, I agree with mobile-blog's assertion that these two services are a waste of energy, because it assumes that:

  1. People are going to spend most of their time typing their location into their cellphone
  2. The rest of the time they will be trying to convince their friends to do the same

[Link from mobile-weblog]

Posted by nym at June 26, 2004 09:20 AM | TrackBack