I Know Where You Were Last Summer

As I eagerly wait for Google’s Latitude to drop on to the iPhone app store, I’ve had the opportunity to try out the web interface in the form of the Latitude iGoogle gadget. Immediately, I was struck by how similar the web interface was to that of the current mobile location network darling, Loopt.

Loopt:

Loopt: Friend Map

Latitude:

Google Latitude: Friend Map

Of course, it is difficult to completely ignore the extra features that Loopt offers or Latitude’s clean look, and many other blog posts discussing these aspects have gone into a lot of detail comparing the two. However, I think that these types of comparisons ignore the fact that these two services are fundamentally the same and suffer from the same fundamental flaw, what I think of as the Catch-22 of Map-Centric Social Networks:

1. Nobody is going to visit the service regularly unless they are getting useful, reliable information.
2. Nobody is going to get useful, reliable information unless everyone is visiting the service regularly.

Loopt or Latitude or any other service can roll out as many features as they want (Journal, Mix, etc.), but the core service that these applications offer won’t become even remotely useful until I stop seeing days or weeks-old status and location updates.  Given that most of my Loopt contacts are iPhone users, it’s possible that this may change if Apple actually does roll out an update in June that allows apps to run in the background, but then that raises all sorts of other questions about the perceived “creepiness” of a service tracking your whereabouts 24/7 (I write this, of course, after having just suffered through “Eagle Eye“), and it will only be the most intrepid of early adopters who will click OK when the “Loopt would like to use your current location…forever” option pops up.

At some point in the future, I really do believe that we will all be comfortable with having all our locations/preferences/activities tracked, as we start to understand the benefits that can be reaped in terms of computers being able to anticipate our actions and serve us better.  In my mind, the only core difference between Loopt and Latitude as they stand now is that Google will be able to fund Latitude for several years until that time comes around, while Loopt will likely have perished much sooner.  In the meantime, an interesting problem is looking at how we can design location-based services that maximize the utility of these services to the point that users actually feel compelled to update because they will gain access to useful, reliable information about their friends while minimizing any “ick” factor.

The first step, I think, will be to give up on the map as the hub of these services.  This is an idea that I have explored a little bit, and some applications have already hit the iPhone app store that take this approach to networking (Borange comes to mind).  I haven’t yet heard any feedback on Borange or any such services, so if you have, it would be great to have you share it here.

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