If you’re a bit of a trendwatcher, your magical divining mouse is probably twitching around in your hands by now. The next wave of social media is coming at us like a credit-card salesman on Orchard Road… and it knows where you are!
Pretty much every new phone is shipping with built-in GPS, and if they don’t have it, then with the arrival of 3G they soon will. Unlike 2.5G (fade in, fade out, scan for network), 3G will be always-on.
What’s going on behind the curtain right now, is a wild scramble to take advantage of the potential of this development.
When the iPhone SDK made it’s debut recently, its Core Location API was also revealed. What could this lead to? Its potential was shown off with an app called Nearby Friends (showing the location of your contacts within a 10 mile radius) and Loopt which shows the user and their friends as pins on a map.
Nokia is also in the game. They recently bought Plazes in Germany. Plazes is a bit like Twitter with geo-tagging, so you know what your friends are doing and where they were doing it. It has a publicly available API and they’ve announced development of a native iPhone client, so it’s obvious that Nokia is intending this to spread across platforms and not just get locked in to its own phones.
Location-aware social networking apps are most definitely going to be the next big thing.
The GPS-enhanced MySpace client for the iPhone is rumoured to be nearly ready, Typepad has just finished up their geo-tagged mobile blogging and photoblogging platform, Google has Dodgeball and you can be sure that all the big names in social networking, and a bunch of names you’re never heard of (yet) are right behind them.
So, what’s the big elephant in the room? One word. Privacy.
Emily Nussbaum jokingly called it the stalkerverse recently in New York Magazine:
“Technology was certainly not supposed to know you were at the laundromat. Or the Yankees game. Or your co-worker’s apartment when you were supposed to be working late. But now when you’re at the laundromat, everyone will know. Because you’ll be letting them know. Maybe not yet; you’re still shy, and think the laundromat is boring. But in a year or two, when everyone is doing it, that shyness will start to seem stupid. It will begin to seem rude not to tell—I mean, what’s wrong with the laundromat? Afraid of someone seeing your socks? Maybe a friend will stop by and lend you a quarter.”
She’s right of course. We saw it all happen back in 2006 (see Danah Boyd or Piers Fawkes’ Red Coat, Black Coat).
Back in those days we all had cryptic email addresses and witty pseudonyms to hide behind, but social media helped us all to turn into an extended-community of exhibitionists.
Piers’ conclusion back in 2006 never seemed more true than today.
“Privacy is dead. It’s over. We can’t wear black coats anymore.”
Pic: You Are Here by creativespark
3 Comments
June 27, 2008 at 5:18 pm
damn it… can’t say work from home next time, and when the boss turns on the phone, he’ll see that i’m actually working at GV Vivocity watching CloverField II!
June 27, 2008 at 6:22 pm
Not a bad idea afterall, since it’s such a hassle to end up following stuffs or people that affects little in what we do.
June 27, 2008 at 6:31 pm
True Ed, definitely true!
And Richard… worse senario… what if you look and you see that all your friends are at GV Vivocity and you weren’t on the invite list! I see some phone-rage on our horizons! :p