Editor's Note: ThreeMinds and Organic welcomes Karri Ojanen, seasoned blogger and information architect to the team.
Much of the Internet, as we know it now, is still top-down, highly virtualized, and not truly mobile. Most of the updates people post come from the comfort of their chair at the laptop, but, in social media, the use of mobile devices is increasing. Some also tout location-aware services as one of the next big opportunities for online marketers.
For the user, the increasingly popular microblogging services are competing to get to everyone's phones from their laptops. Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook and others all offer mobile apps, either third-party or their own, for posting tweets and status updates on the go, but they don't connect the updates with location-based data. Adding location data to the services could offer new opportunity to marketers, who could start offering location-based information to people on the move. And it could help make the connections that people create online more real, when 'current location' is added to the details.
None of these ideas are really new as concepts, but only now the required technology is becoming common enough to spring up some services. The iPhone 3G and other GPS-equipped devices are becoming more popular, and even without GPS the user's current location can be estimated by using the GSM network cell ID or the WiFi network that the user's on.
To that market, there's GyPSii...
Available for BlackBerries, the iPhone, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile devices, it allows users to create points of interest and associate images, video, audio and text, reference the POI to the user's location and categorize, tag and describe the POI and submit it to the server. It also lets the user to search for family and friends using geo-locations and look for third-party points of interest, like more info on nearby businesses and services. GyPSii comes in several languages, and got a lot of attention from everybody from bloggers to the CNN when it was launched at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year. As interesting as it is, it might be a while until GyPSii really kicks off. It only works with GPS-equipped devices, and, with the current cellular battery technology, the use of GPS is a drain on power.
But Nokia's got two other, similar but simpler services for those worried about battery power and without GPS. Friend View features a mobile client that pulls location data from the network cell ID and allows status updates from the road, and a website that is like a stripped-down Twitter, but with a map that georeferences the messages of the user and his/her friends. Another tool, Plazes, can be set to automatically send activities to the user's Twitter feed, and Mac users can download a free application called PresenceRouter that routes their Plazes status also to Tumblr, Facebook, Jaiku, and many other services. Mobile updates on Plazes are SMS-based.
Quite likely it'll still be a little while until these services offer real value to masses, and first users will have to deal with a plethora of different services before winners emerge, or there will be one application that manages to merge all the different services into one account, but for those willing to experiment these are tools worth testing.
Karri Ojanen
in
going mobile, tech talk, the social net
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