Last year, when I did my placement at the Netherlands Youth Institute, I attended an expert meeting with social media researcher Danah Boyd at the University of Tilburg. When she was asked what ‘the next big thing’ in social media would be, she didn’t hesitate and immediately responded that mobile is on the rise. “The technology is leading towards mobile. Location-based technology, like Foursquare and Gowalla (online social media through which you can tell people where you are). The first ones to use new technology are always the geeks, freaks and queers, so I look to them to see what will happen.”
I count myself in at least two of the above stated categories, so obviously I have been using Foursquare like mad for months trying to wrestle the title of ‘mayor’ out of the hands of other geeks and freaks around Utrecht.

I do have to wonder, though; are location-based services really the next big hit on the market, or is it another hype that will die out? Signs point to either side of the spectrum.
More and more social networks are adding location-functionality to their repertoire.
The tendency to share one’s experiences online has been a trend for a while. Most people like sharing that they enjoyed the meal they ate last night, or that they really hate that guy from that one TV show. So now we move on to sharing our locations. This has potential written all over it, we can walk through town with our phones, see our friends are currently chilling out at the Half Moon bar, and walk straight in to join the party.

Based on the information of people’s check-ins, new functionality will be possible in the near future. As Dennis van der Vliet from Feest.je (a Dutch location-based app that let’s you check into both venues and parties) explained to me when I interviewed him for my thesis research a while back, you can start making comparative deductions. Say you have two groups of friends, one in Utrecht and one in Amsterdam. Based on their check-ins, and the metadata of the locations, the application can deduce these friend-groups have similar tastes. So if I, a person from the Utrecht group, go to Amsterdam and ask my application where I should go, the application can recommend a venue that the group from Amsterdam frequents, with a fair assurance that I will enjoy this venue as well.

The problem with applications like these though, is that many people are hesitant to broadcast their whereabouts online. Right now there is, at least in our minds, still a clear distinction between our on- and off-line selves. The thought that people online can see where we are offline brings visions of Big Brother to mind and fills us with feelings of dread. Both Boyd and van der Vliet agreed; with location-based social media like this we will probably see that people will be a lot more picky in accepting their friends requests, we don’t want hundreds of people to know where we are at any given time.

So on the one hand we have an enormous fun-factor and a potential for more targeted information and marketing to guide us through the woods of ‘infobesitas’, but on the other hand there are some serious privacy issues at work here. I for one am intrigued to see how this will develop…

tagged with: location based services, foursquare, feest.je

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