2010 - "Year of location"

Author: Lukas Kubina

Unofficially, 2010 has been labelled by many within the technology world as the "year of location". In addition to offering the social connectivity of Twitter and Facebook, services like Dennis Crowley's Foursquare also use your smartphone's global positioning system (GPS) to broadcast your precise location to your "friends", and should you wish to the wider world. This rapid development is fueled by the tremendous increase of circulating smart phones. According to the market research company Strategy Analytics, 60 million units were sold worldwide only in the second quarter of 2010 - 43 percent more than last year. In an article in The Guardian, Leo Hickman suggests to imagine a supermarket loyalty reward card synced with Twitter, Amazon reviews and GPS technology to get some idea of Fousquare's potency.

Foursquare is now being widely touted as the app which will, after years of aniticaption and prediction, mark the beginning of "life as a game" computing. Behind the playful facade of Gowalla and Foursquare, a new market sprouts that recycles the personal information. Privacy advocates fear that geolocation apps are vulnerable to "data scraping", namely , the sophisticated trawling and monitoring of user activity in an effort to build a rich database of personal information.
The motivation of geolocation companies is to gain the critical mass of users in order to make their service more useful. This way, privacy concerns seem to be lip services while they leave their doors open as much as possible. Technologically, location-based services are not a huge change, socially it is huge. The big moral questions are still being left to the app designers to answer at the moment. At least publicly triggered peer pressure has a controlling function. After Jesper Andersen exposed Foursquare's privacy lapses effectively last month, the company has made some alterations to how user check-in information is revealed to the public.
For more information about Foursquare and the geolocation services check out Dennis Crowley at DLD2010 below.

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