Location Without Context is Dead Sep 4
Much ado is being made of Loopt’s just-announced background location feature where a combination of platform partners, AT&T and some special sauce are providing Loopt subscribers with an “Always-On Location Service.” While this is no doubt a technological marvel of a workaround for Apple’s blockage of background applications, the usefulness of such a feature is questionable.
While it might be fun to watch my friends run around on Google Maps like little ants, I am bored quickly without context. Sure, so you’re stuck in traffic on the 101. Why do I care? If your iPhone is in your back pocket transmitting your constant location while you’re sitting at work for 8 hours today, it does not interest me.
Location without context is dead.
Tell me where you are, what you’re doing and who you’re with… NOW I’m interested. This requires user interaction. Human touch. Location services are swell and all that, but until recently they’ve been lacking a divine spark.
Moreover, Loopt plans to charge users $3.99 a month for this Always-On feature. This seems odd since they can sanitize, aggregate and sell a user’s location data to advertisers for big bucks. Don’t you know InBev pays out royally to know which bars get the most foot traffic?
Between Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other services like ours, the places you go will become an increasingly important part of the social web. But I’d argue that uncensored location data vomit is not what the social web wants or needs. To Loopt’s credit, they seem to be planning to add greater emphasis on places in a future version of their service.
But time will tell if people are willing to pay to be stalked. Personally I’d rather let folks know where I am when I choose to do so.
4 Comments
Presumably the Loopt service is only triangulating based on cellular data as well so it’s not going to be particularly accurate (say 500m-5km accuracy depending on signal strength) – it isn’t remote GPS as with the “find my iPhone” feature of MobileMe as that would require a constantly running background process which would kill the already rather limited iPhone battery.
I personally prefer to carry a GPS tracker which logs my location every second and then play with the data at the end of the day to show where I’ve been and map tweets, videos, photos, and potentially Gowalla spots (*looks for API*) on my own mapping solution. Alternatively, I can update my current location using something like FireEagle from my iPhone and then choose the level of granularity I want other services to see.
Will be interesting to see how, and if, this develops though.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I do think it’s strange that Loopt is charging for this and limiting it to 5000 users (if I remember correctly). I’ve always seen Loopt as an advertisement for itself whenever it’s put to use, and their sluggish, proprietary website makes me want to die. I’m not sure why they’re struggling with AT&T to find a cellular data location logging service just because Apple is resistant to background apps. Seems like a bizarre direction for social and location based data based on a short term mindset.
That said, I started looking elsewhere and that’s how I found Gowalla, and I’m thrilled to have found this early on. Now my friends and I casually enjoy playing with Gowalla like a game, rather than wishing Loopt would take it’s head out of it’s wallet to see where it’s headed.
Otto Sep 21 at 11:57am
I use four main location based apps:
1. BrightKite. Every time I go anywhere, I check in. My friends can then find and join me easily. Handy.
2. Gowalla. Just started playing it, it’s very cool. Putting in new locations is quick and we’ll get this town mapped out yet!
3. Navizon. The jailbroken version lets it run in the background and update my location every 10 minutes, automatically. This gets pushed to Fire Eagle, which can then be read by an app on my Facebook profile page (which only my friends can see), and shows a trail of where I’ve been for the last couple days. Very neat. Plus if I lose my phone, I’ll probably be able to find it.
4. Waze. Simple driving directions application (with voice turn by turn directions). However, it uses a shared-knowledge and wiki like system to both keep maps up to date and to provide reporting tools for accidents, police stops, etc. It’ll also route around such reports and hazards. Also uses average speed information in real time to provide optimal routing. Downside is that it doesn’t know my town very well yet, but one neat feature is incentives to make users map out their town by driving around it, with a pac-man style game, where driving a street collects dots on the screen and additional “points”. Free app, open source, and hella fun. I like it better than even the $100+ driving directions app, simply because it’s useful and neat to mess with even if you know the way to get there.
RMA Sep 30 at 10:21pm
Just got Gowalla. I’m in Dallas, Texas. When I try to “check in” – Gowalla just keeps going through it’s searching loop. I’ve changed locations several times. What’s the deal?