The Limits to Growth of Location Based Services

Over the holidays, I had the opportunity to talk to "real" people - that is, the vast number of people who aren't social media junkies. I was curious about their takes on Location Based Services. My instinct based on some past research (see below) is that they are being over-hyped right now. I was emboldened to publish an analysis of these (admittedly un-structured, non representative) conclusions after a chat with Tomi Ahonen, who has spent a lot of time spotting future Mobile trends and also has come to similar conclusions (clearly seen similar data).

I've tried to express the situation in a sort of "game theory" truth table. Here's the results in a nutshell.

(i) You Disclose, I Don't (Top Left) - most people are very comfortable with this position if they are the service user. Furthermore, they would prefer any service that matches their location to the target to be a "trusted third party" ie not making money via disclosing locations in any way (ie would prefer the service funded by vendors etc and the payback from usage of vendor servives, tops a referral fee). Google's new location based search is interesting, its success wil I suspect depend on the trust people have in them as a third party.

(ii) You Disclose, I Disclose (Top Right) - Although this is the preferred model of most Social Media platforms, most people are initially sceptical about this, as they don't like the idea of having a lot of other people knowing where they are all the time. I will address the issue of "on 24/7" now - almost no-one likes this, and everyone worried about the "social expectation creep" - ie if you show your location some of the time, why not all of the time. Its interesting to note that Loopt records increasing use of their service that allows users to enter a false location.

(iii) I Disclose, You Don't (Bottom Right) No-one likes this model for themselves, but do want those who offer public services to do it this way (ie a restaurant discloses its location, but does not see yours). Unfortunately, the Advertising based business models defitely want to see your location so they can push Ads to you.

(iv) You and I are both private - We only agree to disclose locations to each other, and then its private. This works like IM, and people like the idea of having IM like controls on disclosure (eg barring who can see when they are online). Again though, there was a worry about expectations - employers, significant others etc feeling they had a right to see your location at all times.

There is also a general worry about privacy (do I want others to see where I am, and then be able to tell others) and datamining (what will be done with my data). By the way, I was also curious about the reservations quite a few experienced Social Media users expressed when I spoke to them over the last year or so, and its interesting to see Dopplr - despite being a Web 2.0 darling - never really got traction. The Privacy issue is quite interesting, in that people definitely feel that some personal data are more private than others, and location (especially outside of work hours) is seen as quite personal. I suspect there is something about its timeliness, level of abstraction, and who has access to it.

From this I think we can predict that the following will work:

- Vendors who disclose their locations to all and sundry, and allow anonymised checking by users against their own locationsn (like websites do now). Having to give away identity will create a barrier.

- Person/s to Person/s services that are "equal" in status and can be turned on and off at will (or at least the person can go off-radar)

- Open Disclosure (All see All) for limited functions (not particulalrly personal) and periods of time, where the benefits of collaborating with others outweigh the benefits of disclosure

I would also predict that any service will only work if it allows people to put in false locations, as Loopt is finding.

All other services, in my opinion, will struggle to gain traction over time. They may bribe users for a while, and may get a small acdre of users who are privacy agnostic or ignorant, but capturing most of the poeple most of teh time will - in my view - be a pipe-dream.

(Past Research - we did some consumer research on child location tracking devices some years ago - in panels there was general approval across the board until people worked out that significant others and employers could use it to track them too. Then enthusiasm waned quite fast.)