Where are we? Mobile Geolocation and Social Presence

Someone at a party the other night was trying to explain what you could do with geolocation on your phone. The conventional wisdom is, it would be “great” because if you are standing on street corner your phone could tell you the nearest pizza restaurant. Or it blink at you with “offers” from the nearest pizza restaurant .

No, I said, the killer app is not about where I am, it’s where my friends are. Sure, often times we don’t want to run in to each other, but sometimes we do. And when we do, it would be great to see who from my buddy list (my real buddy list) might be nearby and we could ping each other, want to meet up? or hey, the movie is about to start are you almost here? where are you?

We try to do this manually with social presence apps with twitter, or for the truly brave plazes. Once it gets easy enough, “social location” services will be huge, and may just be the missing piece in social presence we’ve been wondering about.

Businesses already make fairly extensive use of gps to track vehicle fleets and sometimes personnel, but the consumer/social applications are just scratching the surface. (of course lots of juicy privacy and location-based-gossip issues will be waiting for us…)

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