The old realtors adage of “Location, Location, Location” seems to be applying to social media. Facebook have announced their new places service (http://www.facebook.com/places/). It's available on the iPhone Facebook app or via touch.facebook.com . Of course it's nothing new , sites such as Foursquare.com have been around for a while, offering the same geo-locational social networking. It is important not to dismiss geographic social media (geosocial media). Foursquare is everywhere. I live in Cincinnati, hardly a teeming metropolis, but pretty much everywhere I seem to go has a Foursquare “major”. A major in Foursquare terms is a status given to someone who visits a place the most. Even my neighbors house had a major, which turned out to be someone no one knew. A friend of mine traveled across the USA and he said Foursquare was everywhere he went too. This is not some passing trend. Now that Facebook has go into the scene it will only grow.
There is the privacy paradox of course. On the one side there is a lot of noise about not wanting to tracked by your friends, about how criminals can use the services to work out which houses to burgle. The flip side is that it is everywhere and there seem to be a lot of people using it. So I think the privacy arguments are simply not strong enough, maybe it just means you have to be careful about who your friends are, not bad advice in general.
The potential for businesses of this type of geosocial media are huge. Many types of businesses don't really know their clientele very well, but this is a way to know who comes to your business and more importantly to know when they arrive. It offers all sorts of potential for surveys and rewards. I was struck at a market research conference a couple of months ago how few people there knew about geosocial media. If the geosocial media takes off we have a new way to find out what people are doing, and when they are doing it. It seems it will pay to know where your friends are....
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