Sharing your location with your friends in real time might be the next big trend on the internet. Kirk touched on this a bit in our niche marketing article. There are scores of new websites cropping up to make it easier to let your friends know where you are, meet up with people in your area, or find out information about your location (not too mention show you location relevant ads). I came across a great video of Tom Coates from Yahoo! talking about Fire Eagle and the location based landscape. Fire Eagle is a web app that is designed to serve you content based on your location. The "consumer facing" features of Fire Eagle are actually pretty sparse. The really interesting things about Fire Eagle, however, are the APIs that they provide. Essentially they are working as a "location broker", meaning they provide a backend location service for other web apps to tap into and use however they can imagine. In the video below Tom Coates talks about the plethora of location based sites out there and the potential in location based computing. The video is almost 18 minutes long, so I will post links to the websites below if you don't want to watch the entire thing, though I do highly recommend it.
Services to update your location and current location based uses:
Navizon - Peer to peer phone app that updates your location every 10 minutes
Loki - Free location based search and navigation tool bar that also updates your location every 10 minutes
Zonetag - Geotag your photos from your mobile phone
Firebot - A Twitter based app. You Direct Message @Firebot your location and it updates Fire Eagle
Brightkite - Uses "check in" locations to update your location and connect you with your friends
Rummble - Helps you discover people or places that you would like based on your location
Plazes - Helps you create events and activities in the "Real World" at specific times and places
Spot - GPS Satellite Messenger Unit for Journalists, Backpackers, Travelers to show progress, check in with friends & family, and get assistance
Wikinear - Shows you Wikipedia articles near your location (this feature is also now available through Google Maps)
Lightpole - Helps you find restaurants and bars near you as well as reviews
Outside.in - Determines the location that blog posts and news articles refer to, and serves you them when you are near
Metosphere - A service that attempts to overlay meta data on the physical world. And introduces something called "GeoBlogs"
Fireball - Plots your friends' locations on a Yahoo! Map
Fire Widgets - Widgets from Fire Eagle that give you weather and geotagged photos for wherever you are
Moveable Type - Introduced a plugin that displays your location on a map on your blog
So which of these apps will be the next big thing? Which are here to stay and which will just fade away? One thing is for sure, a great idea doesn't necessarily make a great app. Implementation is just as (or more) important.
Brightkite has been getting a lot of hype lately. I have had a chance to sit down with this service a bit. Their proposition is that you can track your friends' locations in real time and meet up with people around you. Long story short, it uses "check in" points. Meaning you periodically tell Brightkite the address of where you are. If you don't know the address, you can do a search by company name (Starbucks, for example). This is pretty easily done via laptop from their site. However, the real opportunity for a service like this is in using your mobile phone. Unfortunately, Brightkite is less than convenient from your phone. The process is way to manual. You send a Text Message with your address. If you don't know your address, send the name of a company. They then send a message back with a list of company locations for you to choose from (not an easy task to choose from a list of Starbucks in a downtown metropolitan city). At this point it is hard to see the full benefits of all your effort, because of the relatively small user base (it is still in beta, afterall). The process is too much effort and not enough reward. The implementation of Brightkite is just not simple enough yet. I don't want to track down my address so I can tell it to Brightkite. It feels like I am doing the work for them! Updating your location needs to be more automated, using GPS or Wifi Triangulation. It needs to be as simple as 1 or 2 clicks to update and post your location. Minimize the amount of work I need to do in order to use Brightkite, then I will whole heartedly jump on board!
If you want to try out Brightkite for yourself, we have some invites. Post a comment below or find us on Twitter.
