I’ve been thinking about location and mobile a lot lately, mostly trying to wrap my head around this nebulous (at least to me) “social location” trend. It seems to me that so many “location-based services” — I just shudder uopn reading that term — of today are rehashes of many of the same ideas from the early days of LBS, they’ve just got slightly better UIs and GPS makes them less of a hassle.
So it was with some interest I followed some of the tweets coming out of this week’s Mobile Monday London, which was about location. It was apparently inspired, in part, by an article from Mobile Entertainment dispelling that industry’s top 10 myths, which included this gem:
9. “Location-based technology is intrinsically exciting for consumers…”
No it’s not. The phrase “location-based technology” intrinsically puts most people who aren’t in the mobile industry to sleep. And they look equally unimpressed if you promise them their phone can guide them to the nearest cashpoint… The problem is that this is all still technology-led. The assumption that everyone wants to track their friends – and especially that they regularly go out in town with no specific plans in mind of who to meet or where to go – is unproven at best. As is the idea that people want to geotag all their photos and videos and share them with the world, all the time.
The next year or two will see some really smart, desirable mobile services launch that use location. But it’s the ones that are actually based on stuff people want to do that will succeed.
Kudos to Stuart Dredge for nailing it on the head. Put another way by @bookmeister: “IMO location is like messaging, billing or identity it will be a part of all good apps, it’s not a service on it’s own”.
Good stuff that pretty much sums up how I’m seeing things at the moment. One further point to make: based on some more tweets, it looks like somebody brought up the old Starbucks ad example again. You know — the “wow, it’ll be awesome for a Starbucks to be able to send ads to everybody that walks by.”
No, it won’t. Russell thoroughly debunked this scenario more than two years ago, and not a damn thing has changed, except the technology. But, like Stuart pointed out, that’s irrelevant. Just because we now have the ability to do something, doesn’t make it useful or desirable. And that seems to sum up much of the mobile location world at this point.
Your thoughts? Who’s got a great mobile service built around location right now? Or am I just totally off the map (ha ha) here?
—–>Follow us on Twitter too: @russellbuckley and @caaarlo
I totally agree. We have been doing some research into how you make location more exciting to the user. We have explored telling stories using comedy, mystery and drama. We have discovered how a mobile device can bring somewhere alive using location based audio. The difference is, this is content led and not technology led and we are getting some really good user feedback at every step of our journey. It’s work in progress, and we are expanding our work next year to a much larger geographic area. We have some tough questions to answer, but I firmly believe that users want to be entertained and not just fed an endless stream of near useless location based data. You can find our research on our website at http://www.pocketplaces.co.uk (dekstop or mobile).
Have you checked out:
http://foursquare.com/
?
‘… But it’s the ones that are actually based on stuff people want to do that will succeed.’
Yes, but what could be more obvious!
@Mark – love the website but couldn’t find PocketPLaces on the AppStore?!
For the only real sustained example of a location orientated service is geo-caching where a community has built up around this acitivy. However, the most often cited reason cited for partaking is social walking so location is simply a means to this end not the reason itself
Thanks for the great comments!
Matt — I have seen Foursquare, it’s a good example of what I’m talking about in that it’s basically the same service as Dodgeball was several years ago (made by the same people, in fact), with a few incremental upgrades.
iPhone Developer — sometimes it’s the most obvious lessons that are the most overlooked
Carlo, yes, and ironically it is also quite similar to Mobile Hunt which I designed in 2000. Go figure
Another case of my being WAY ahead of the curve. Hopefully I have the timing right with my latest: http://www.cryptopix.com
Carlo, yes some of us are gadget/technology heads and occasionally we can be impressed by something new which we once thought difficult to achieve, a la Nick’s 15 eggs/wineglasses trick in Russell’s scenario two years ago. However even for the those endowed with the fanciest propeller-hats, a new technology is only interesting the first time viewed and once we’ve blogged & tweeted it to our friends the endorphins soon flush from one’s system.
But as SBS, a TV station here in Australia tags “there are six billion stories”. We are all here on this planet at our own unique location and we all face issues, problems, and opportunities at any time of day. We all have ideas, cravings, wants and needs at any time – some of which are related to or sparked by our location.
I was fortunate enough to be involved in J-Phone’s launch of their J-NAVI service in 2000. A mobile concierge that searched the Japanese business and fixed-phone directories (35m records), J-NAVI returned the usual details and optionally a map of the found place. The launch was promoted by an advertising campaign that cost somewhere near $6m and achieved 3m user sessions in the first 3 days of operation. By my calculation it broke even after 9 months and continued to run very profitably for about 5 years.
Why was J-NAVI successful? Going beyond the famous Japanese enthusiasm for new gadgetry, J-NAVI provided a simple and accessible alternative to the city street directory (of which there were very few in Tokyo at the time) in the worlds’ most consumer-driven city, where most people are public transport commuters and go out to eat lunch most days. Tokyo is big and densely populated with very confusing street addressing (yes even for locals). J-NAVI provided answers to daily questions for J-Phone subscribers and until the ubiquity of Google Maps there has not been much else to compare in the (dare I say it) LBS space.
But what about the maps? In those days, all the GIS guys tried to tell us that we needed maps to know where we were and to know where we were going. I used to say “who needs a map or directions when you have your wife in the car beside you and your mother-in-law in the rear seat?” Well J-NAVI also debunked the stuff about maps and LBS too – from my memory of our log analysis, about 91% of all queries ended with the text response and only 9% of users continued on to request a map on their phone. The implication being that most people know where to go and don’t need a map because they are searching in familiar territory.
I guess my point is this. The fact that we all have a location as one of our personal parameters at any point in time means that the things we are thinking about at that time often have a location context. If our location can help to solve a problem then its use may contribute to a service that people are willing to pay for.
I won’t get into location-based messaging (a la SBux) but suffice it to say that in my view there are still some missing pieces to that particular puzzle and you can bet your bottom dollar that the G-gnomes are hard at work on gaining control of them right now.
Perhaps if we renamed the services that use location, to something nice like “Really Useful Services” we could get away from the LBS cringe, but oh damn, Andrew Lloyd Webber already owns that…
Brilliant Carlo
Twittered about it, excellent posting, totally agree.
Tomi Ahonen
I disagree. Forget about the Starbucks example for now and consider what is more likely to happen on a large scale in the near term.
Facebook and Twitter is going to enable location at some point and then we’ll really be able to see the ways it becomes useful rather than just another mobile ad mechanic.
By integrating it with Facebook, you don’t have any barriers for usage for 300 million users. They just continue updating as they always have, no download, no new sign ups, that’s how I see location being a hit. The whole latitude thing didn’t work so well because not all my friends have a Google account, however they do have a Facebook one.
Location will be utilised by either handset manufacturer (things like Nokia Maps/Blackberry Maps serving ads), mobile network (signing up for a service where your location is used to send you offers via partnerships with brands) or Apps/online sites like Facebook/Atm finder etc.
How could location be a service on it’s own? I didn’t really get what that meant.
[...] Location on Mobile: Still Wandering Around A Little Aimlessly [...]
aaaand, here it comes:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/29/facebook-rewrites-privacy-policy-foreshadows-location-based-services/
[...] joining in the debate at MobHappy on the post ‘Location on Mobile: Still Wandering Around A Little Aimlessly‘ I decided to post on here why I think location is about to become very [...]