LBS delusion (again)
(Via Small Surfaces), this “Do humans really need location based services?” is interesting at it covers some of the questions I am wondering about when it comes to the potential of LBS. An excerpt I found intriguing:
“Even though I am confident that there will certainly be significant growth in some areas (i.e. vehicle tracking, in-car traffic information) I doubt that someday everyone will be using Google’s “Search nearby” feature to find the next ATM, restaurant or supermarket.
Even though mobility and travel has increased tremendously, the majority of people still roam in just a few locations and in general they do not move far from home. Vacations and business travel are exceptions - the percentage of time individuals spend in locations they don’t know is very small.
(…)
I strongly believe that there will be a market for location based services. Nevertheless I think one has to shift focus from the technical possibilities that GPS-enabled, connected mobile devices potentially offer. The key is to understand the potential users of these location-based services in order to be able to find the next “location-based killer app”.“
What I find intriguing here is the coupling of the need for LBS and the recent results about people’s mobility showed in the last issue of Nature. It seems indeed that apart from navigational LBS (in-car GPS), other applications (such as location-based annotations and friend finders) are failing to find a user base.
Why do I blog this? interesting elements to be added to my list of LBS issues that I presented at O’Reilly ETech 2008 (see my slides on Slideshare). Although there are more and more “yet another LBS” projects recently, i am also noticing that people increasingly start to raise eye-brows about it (see for example Joe MacCarthy’s blogpost about meetro) 2007 was about the delusion of the non-satNAV LBS pioneers and 2008 start to get some interesting criticisms and afterthoughts about LBS.
Interestingly, one of the comment of this blogpost is about the fact that “the title is intriguing as it suggests that there might be someone else (machines, m2m, the web of things) who will make use of LBS more than we will do (location-based APIs?)“. As it surely connects with 2006 discussions about blogjects or the idea of “new interaction partners” (the presence of pets in the internet of things).
June 10th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Humans and LBS…
In your daily life you might know where things are and don’t need to search for them - but I see many other little problems to be solved and needs to be fulfilled:…
June 11th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Interesting whether the availability of LBS will encourage people to stray from the areas that they know.
I’m sure they will for me. I work in a large city that I do not know well, but live next to a small city (which I do know well). When I need to buy something, I will typically head into the small, known city, instead of venturing into the big, less-known city.
If I had LBS, I would certainly be tempted to go to the big city instead.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:04 am
this post rings true with me. Lotta new mobile services appearing without any clear context of use or need. While many people are giddy with the possibilities, in most cases, location is NOT a social object.
June 23rd, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Coming to this conversation a bit late. But, here we go. Perhaps the value in LBS, will be process based, i.e. not that someone is “here” and now “here”, but “it will take you 20 minutes to get to your next meeting, you should leave now”
How many times has a meeting gone on for 20 minutes too long, and your next meeting is now going to have to be 20 minutes shorter, just because the other person does not know that you are “running late”? Surely a live-API-Outlook could have an element that is dynamic. In many instances/cultures, the meeting time is more fluid anyway, why does technology not reflect this?
On another note: enjoying your “take away” at end of post style