What are you doing?" asks Twitter — and every day it receives an estimated 40 million answers from an army of tweeters that includes household names such as Jonathan Ross ("Thanks for all the kind words re Baftas") and Andy Murray ("Losing the battle with jet lag"). But the hot new question from social media is "Where?" And soon it might not just be humans that reply.
It's a trend that is being propelled by the explosion of mobile phones with GPS. That's the technology that lets your iPhone, say, pinpoint you on a map or recommend a local restaurant. And increasingly people are using such devices as the gateway through which they plug in to their social networks. The number of Facebook users who log on via the company's mobile application has grown from 20 million in January 2009 to 100 million today, and those who still access the service through their computer or netbook are half as active on the site.
All of which has created the perfect conditions for a new species of social network to emerge — one based on location (a so-called 'geosocial network'), which telegraphs its participants' longitude and latitude. Take Foursquare, which lets users 'check in' to places via GPS, notifying their friends where they are, and recommend places they've visited. As motivation there is a gaming element: in doing these things you earn points. It launched in March 2009 and it reportedly already has around 275,000 account holders. But what's the big attraction? "It brings people together in the real world even better than things like Facebook or Twitter have," says Ben Parr, co-editor of social media guide Mashable.com. "Instead of saying, 'We're going to be at this location or that,' all I have to do is broadcast where I am — making it very simple to meet up with my friends."
So imagine you're in a departure lounge waiting for a flight— with this you can tell if a friend of yours is also in the terminal, and arrange to meet up with them. "Or if you're in a city and open up Google Buzz [the location-based service launched in February] you can see the chatter around you and figure out what people are buzzing about nearby — such as events or parties."
To users, geosocial networks are a lifestyle aid; to businesses they are marketing nirvana, enabling them not only to send targeted ads but to reach potential customers anywhere, at any time. Foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley explains that his service can do so deftly both for big brands and small businesses: "If there's a TV show, and someone on the show goes to a restaurant and you go to the same restaurant, then you unlock a 'badge' for doing it. Or if you visit a local restaurant enough times then you unlock a coupon. We're reinventing the coupon to make it social, so you can only use it when you're there with three or four of your friends, or if you're a regular there."
In the future, he says, Foursquare may analyse your behaviour in order to calculate 'smart recommendations', such as for a new café to visit nearby. Other networks are aware of the potential revenues, though Crowley hopes that Foursquare's playfulness will give it the edge over competitors. That said, if Facebook went geo it would, in theory, be able to correlate its 400 million users' locations with the fine-grained data held in their profiles, enabling the company to deploy ads with robot precision.
But this isn't the end game. Pundits speculate that social networks may eventually look even less like the MySpaces of yore, as ever-cheaper sensors allow them to extend their reach to an array of inanimate objects that broadcast information about themselves. That might not sound useful, but consider this: if your pot plant needs watering, it can send you a tweet (just order the kit from Botanicalls.com).
Inanimate objects could vastly enrich geosocial networks, says Crowley: "Let's say the front door of a bar is smart enough to know about who walked in or out. Suddenly you've got a restaurant that's advertising 'I'm full' or 'I'm empty'. Or perhaps you could hook up a sensor in the park linked to Shazam to detect what kind of music is being played, so it might say to you, 'Hey, guess what, there's a jazz band playing right now' — something it knows you're interested in because you recently checked in to a jazz club."
That makes your geodata a prized commodity, for which the net giants will tussle — they will all want you to tap their icon when you decide to 'check in'. Yet behind the shiny tech lies a primitive impulse: we are social animals, so any service that makes it easier for us to be social will be popular. But we're private animals too. Google overlooked this to its detriment when it launched Buzz in February (scorned for revealing too much private information). And PleaseRobMe.com, with its list of empty houses gleaned from geosocial networks, throws privacy concerns into sharp relief for would-be registrants (see below).
It's likely that the successful platforms will be those that find the right balance between offering all the elegant possibilities of geolocation, while furnishing their users with just the right amount of security.
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