Is Who’s Nearby a Business?
A really interesting piece over at Mobile Industry Review about Google Latitude and the business (or lack thereof) of letting you know where your friends are by Andrew Scott. (Dennis from Dodgeball posted a few of his thoughts on Latitude the other day.)
I’m not really sure where I fall on this one (mostly because I haven’t given it a ton of thought). I was never a heavy Dodgeball user, but I know a lot of smart people who were. (I suspect the truth is it will work for some people much better than it will work for others and could be a viable business on a smaller scale, probably never mainstream.)
Really, though, my favorite part of the article was just generally about social networking: “Many of us have been waiting for location-based services to come of age for YEARS! but in reality we’re still in the early adopter curve. In fact, I’d go even further than that. At BeingDigital in 2008 I stated on stage to a deluge of ridicule, that Social Networking wasn’t yet main stream. The laughing continued until I asked how many parents AND siblings of delegates had email? The answer was predictable: virtually everyone. Then I asked how many parents and siblings were also on a social network; over 75% of the hands dropped.” Very interesting.