If you have been paying any attention to the social media space for the last few years, then you've watched the rise in location-based social media. A few years ago Loopt and Brighkite offered the ability for users to check in to a physical location. Then came Google Latitude, Foursquare and Gowalla. Each one had its selling point — games, competition, badges, pins, notifying when your friends are near, creating a history of your travels, and so on.
Part of the appeal of these tools is seeing where you have been, almost like a travelogue for a person, as well as tracking others (friends or family). Brighkite, for example, has offered a GeoRSS/KML feed for some time that you can feed into Google Maps or MapQuest, or really anything that can read the geo-tagged posts. It has taken some time, but the rest of the web is finally catching up:
- Twitter is asking for your location, and displaying map links with tweets.
- Facebook has announced its intent to track location.
- Smart phone utilities are popping up to make it easier to track activity in a place.
Go ahead and read the rest of the article (and see the swanky screen shots) at evolt.org: Mapping Location-Based Social Media
This is pretty comprehensive. I think you might have even beaten me on checking some of these new things out ;)
ReplyDeleteConsidering I don't have an iPhone, I am hella surprised. Feed me any others you hear about, your market is much denser (cooler) than mine.
ReplyDeleteCheckin Mania has just added their app to Google Maps Apps. It's now a bit like the Foursquare Everywhere app on Bing:
ReplyDeletehttp://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://www.checkinmania.com/checkinmania_mapplet.xml