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  1. Advertisers try to Use Geolocation – and the Law Wonders if it Should

    sujata on March 22nd, 2010

    Tags: , , , ,

    facebook-logoIn the world goes crazy over privacy breaches on Buzz, and Facebook, there is a lot of material in the new geolocation services, to get worked up over. There are nearly 100 location sharing applications out there, and one thing that really comes across anyone who has used any of these, is that Privacy features are not really central to the way these applications work.

    If we thought that Facebook and other social networking applications, outraged our privacy, that sounds so old next to what geolocation services are able to do. The US government is quickly trying to catch up with protecting the rights of the citizens affected by these new services. It can’t be long before advertising services try to geo-locate you to serve you advertisements for the place you are in at any point. But now, if everyone can find you – you could be in trouble with the government, or with your job for it – if you can’t ever keep your life to yourself. And will the police be allowed to check on your location if you forget to turn off that function when you are on the run? Do they have the right? All these will be thrashed out, over the coming years as privacy begins to be defined as has never been imagined before.

    Meanwhile, there are major new services jumping on the bandwagon all the time. Google Chrome’s latest version, uses a new kind of geolocation. It looks at your WiFi network, and all the ones around you to determine where you are. And the most anticipated entry in the arena is Facebook – as it plans to announce at its f8 developer conference. Facebook has been trying to get this feature right for about a year now, and has included location sharing regulations on its boilerplate. App makers are now going to be able to make use of the Facebook location API to get some real useful functions out there.

    But Facebook isn’t really trying to steal market share from established players like Foursquare. In fact, Facebook plans to make use of all the location services, to present them all on its network. What Facebook seems most interested in, over destroying any startup’s business model, is in trying to gain advertising share from Google. Facebook has had revamped business pages for months now, in hopes of enticing small business advertisers away from Google. Google’s Latitude is a great competing service in this area.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 1:24 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. With such a Fragmented Geolocation Market, how does one keep Track?

    sujata on March 21st, 2010

    Tags: , , , , , ,

    SXSW logo 2008South by Southwest (SXSW) is a group of immensely popular cultural festivals for music and film in Austin, Texas,that rouses tremendous interest in culture buffs everywhere, and this year’s edition, is set to start this week in March. The reason this is of interest to a tech blog like this is, that social media services get a tremendous boost catering to events of this magnitude where there is always something spectacular happening undiscovered that someone or the other needs to spread the word about. But in the months leading up to the festival, social media reports have been completely swamped with one new buzzword – Geolocation.

    With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.

    Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.

    When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2010 at 1:03 am and is filed under Social Media News, social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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