It’s no mystery that I am huge fan of mobile computing. I am a bigger fan of the potential in geolocation. But I am pretty disappointed with the current offering of geo aware applications like Foursquare and others.
Here is my problem with the current lineup, they make it an effort on my part to use them.
When it comes to technology I have a little saying “You are either the tool, or the operator. Don’t be a tool.” The trouble is, most people are tools. What I mean by this is that most people change the way they operate to use technology instead of the technology adapting to the way they operate. Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not add a layer on top of our already busy lives.
Take Foursquare for instance. I pick on Foursquare because they are the current rage. Here is a thumbnail of how Foursquare works. I arrive at a location, say the local Starbucks. I break out my phone, search for this location, or if I am lucky it will show up in a list of nearby locations (I am never lucky.). At this point I select that I want to check-in. It tells me how many points I earned for the check-in. Right it’s a game too, I don’t really get this part, but bragging rights (bragging to whom?) is a compelling draw of the app. It asks me if I want to fire off this information to my “friends,” or spam my twitter feed to let everyone know I am at Starbucks.
Do you pick up on the issues? My phone already knows my location. But I have to do all this stuff, when all I wanted to do is drink a coffee. To be fair, the end game is to get revenue from the venues you check into, so they want to know specifically where you are and have made it seem like you want everyone to know you are at Starbucks in order to get the check-in and they have had some moderate success with this with McDonalds, despite the early sensational (and highly inaccurate) headline.
But is it really what you wanted?
Isn’t what you really wanted was for friends to know you are in a location, and if they are nearby to contact you and maybe you could get together? Google Latitude already does this, but it has some issues, like accuracy of my location and it’s not reliable at informing me when one of my friends are nearby. But that is the way Google works, the toss a good idea out, get it started, and if it catches on maybe they will throw some resources at it, maybe not.
Well an interesting application is about to be released that has the potential of being the tool that geo aware apps should be, called geoloqi. It is an app that will let me leave a note, so when one of my friends are at the place I left a note, they will get it. Ever wondered what the historical significance of that interesting building is, well if you are standing by it, geoloqi will send you a link to it’s wikipedia page. ReadWriteWeb had this to say about it:
“The consumer service could make the dream of passively consuming ambient information about our surroundings a reality”
I haven’t used it yet, but it is certainly a step in the right direction.
So get out there and stop being a tool.
