Why Location Based Social Networks Need To Offer Something Different
Sep 18 2008 
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Today on FriendFeed, Tamar Weinberg posted a message on FriendFeed about giving up on Brightkite. I asked Tamar what she was getting out of it to begin with and she replied,
To be honest, not much. I forged one real life friendship out of it, so that was cool — it was fun to share my destinations with friends (more specifically, the pictures that I took were well-received). That’s about it, though. I don’t have a GPS-enabled phone so Brightkite did it for me.
I don’t think she’s alone at all with this response. I’ve written my thoughts about this before with What’s Plaguing Your Mobile Social Network? on ReadWriteWeb. Here is an expansion on those thoughts.
Quicker And Easily Accessible Methods
For those that aren’t technologically challenged, sharing photos is easy, you send them via mail or drop them off to a friend’s house. You can even send pictures via your cellphone. My mom does it all the time. They really don’t want to go through the process of signing up and logging into a service every time they want to send a picture to a friend. It’s much quicker to just send it by your cellphone. Destinations can be shared via a phone call or text message. “Why do I need a service to do this?” is probably what they’re thinking when they have a mobile phone that does the same.
The fact of the matter is that location based social networks are all about interacting with strangers if your friends aren’t on it. Most people could care less about sharing photos with people they don’t know or finding out where everyone is going if no one they know will be there. Simultaneously, all this information is readily available with just one phone call. No computer or internet service required.
“No Results Were Found For The Location You Entered”
Regardless of whether we have GPS-enabled phones or not, location based social networks just don’t seem to offer what we want them to. It’s not entirely their fault either. We forget that outside of our bubble of all things web and social media related, the rest of the world could care less about these things, especially in the U.S. If I’m not mistaken, we’d be better off trying to use these networks in China.
Maybe the focus on location should be changed in some way because outside of major cities and metropolitan areas, these services can do absolutely nothing for anyone. Outside of those cities, no one knows about these things and probably wouldn’t care to use them even if they did.
Offer Something Different
I think that location based social networks will have to start offering something different. Prime examples of networks that offer or will offer something different is Buzzd, Loopt, and Moximity. They offer things outside of sharing your location and pictures with strangers or friends. Buzzd supplies reviews of places near you to help you choose where to go to whenever you feel like checking out something new or going out just for the heck of it. Moximity also plans to offer something similar. Loopt offers reviews from Yelp.
These services stick to the overall topic of location, but move away from the social networking side of things. Social networking isn’t for everyone and they realize this. So they give their audiences offerings that aren’t driven by the fact that you need your friends on the service in order to find value.
Questions To Answer And Discuss
- What do you want out of a location-based social network?
- What don’t you get from current offerings?
- How could these services get you and your friends to join?
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I thought this social network seemed pretty interesting, it's like Flickr but all the photos are organized according to the location the pictures are taken.
http://www.panoramio.com/
Seems like a pretty cool way to document a location, again the user isn't necessarily the focus the location is.
Have you checked out the Nokia location based service called plazes? Seems to offer some interesting benefits however not yet available with mobile clients like whirrl.com.
Confused, when you say “could care less” do you mean care a lot and therefore have scope to care less or do you mean “couldn't care less” as in don't care at all and therefore could not possibly care any less than that? Could you please clarify as this doesn't make a lot of sense without knowing that. Thanks.
Hi everyone.
A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.
On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?
I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.
I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.
If anyone wants to take a look you can go here
Thanks,
Regards,
Juan
Hi everyone.
A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.
On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?
I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.
I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.
If anyone wants to take a look you can go here
Thanks,
Regards,
Juan
Hi everyone.
A few days ago, I was surfing the web and I found out a project that works over most mobile phones which lets you know where your friends are in real time and update your status in twitter. It´s called Dimdix.
On their website they say you don´t need a GPS system to detect your location. Does anyone know how this works?
I´m using a Motorola L7 and amazingly it detected my location.
I cannot stop thinking of all the things I could do with it.
If anyone wants to take a look you can go here
Thanks,
Regards,
Juan