The focus at SXSW is clearly on location, and rightfully so. People are gaga over competitors Gowalla and Foursquare which have ridiculous usage growth in the past 6 months and look like very promising companies.
Unfortunately, I have to admit I’ve never been a big fan of either of these services. I completely back the ultimate link between data about our actions and where we are, I just can’t get behind the whole manual check-in/game-based approach. I’m an automator at heart and find it tough to get behind data collection technologies until they are invisible to users. Obviously the major reason behind requiring manual check-in is the fact that you just can’t do background location grabbing on the iPhone (though this may change with OS 4.0), but it remains to be seen whether there will still be manual portions to the check-in processes if/when background location grabbing becomes possible. (As a side note, GPS tracking is a big battery hog, so it also remains to be seen how big a dent background location tracking will put into battery life at least until lithium-sulfur technology is widely available). Since I’m not a Foursquare or Gowalla user, I can’t really say how much of product’s social value is the “game” behind the check-in process vs. the ability to track where our friends are, although ultimately I believe the latter obviously becomes most important).This post is not about either Foursquare or Gowalla anyway. This post is about taking a quick, albeit meandering, look at one of the amazing opportunities opened up once accurate background location tracking becomes a reality.
Let’s assume that our social media presence is built-out to include computer-readable data about where we are, what we do, and etc., and location-based background data gathering becomes a reality and is part of this presence. I’m not sure if this is a part of Facebook, Twitter, Google profiles, or, perhaps most likely, some new service that doesn’t exist right now. This presence data is readable by anyone, but perhaps not shared in a way that links the data to us personally (i.e. if I’m a company, I can see user 222′s data, and I can even contact user 222, but I don’t know his name or any other identifiable information — of course one problem here is that if I see where he lives via the location data I can probably figure who he is on my own, but let’s ignore that problem for now and assume there’s ultimately some solution).
Now let’s take a hypothetical situation in a future where everyone is hyper location-aware. I’m looking for a home entertainment system, from speakers to furniture to the services required to set it up. I walk into Best Buy and look around at speakers, TVs, cabinets, wires, etc. I then walk down the street to West Elm and look at enclosure units and base units for TVs with accompanying closets/stands/whatever for other A/V equipment. Meanwhile during all of this my phone has tracked my location and uploaded this location data to the “presence” referred to above. Not only does this location data mention what stores I’ve been in, but also what areas of those stores and thereby what products I’ve looked at (because in his hyper location-aware scenario, retailers have published coordinate data on what products are where in their stores [or perhaps RFID transmitters/readers do this work for them).
Now my online “presence” data indicates to anyone who’s paying attention that I am currently in the market for home entertainment products. This could be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a bad thing if that just means I get spammed with offers. It’s a good thing if I mostly see offers from people whose offers I will value — or maybe I even see offers for products and/or services I wasn’t explicitly looking for, but turn out to be great deals or tremendously useful. The difference between the two is precisely the social layer we are so busy cultivating at the moment — the so-called “PageRank” for socially-driven interactions. If a offer/service/provider is rated highly given my social network and interactions, I see offers from that provider. Otherwise, I don’t. Now we’ve got a really useful marketing tool that benefits both sides of the equation, consumers and sellers.
Some of this is already doable (though not really being done) using services like Blippy, but location-based information gathering offers so much more lucrative data. I don’t know how quickly a setup like this will become reality, although I would guesstimate at least 4-5 years. Nonetheless, I look forward to seeing how this data gathering and use evolves. Privacy be damned!
