It’s all about location, location, location

By Steven Campbell

Have you heard of location technology? Good. If you haven’t, you will, because it’s everywhere. I’m not talking about historical location tech like smoke signals or carrier pigeons either. I’m not even referring to old-school GPS navigators or radio triangulation. I’m talking about Foursquare.

For those who’ve been living in a box for the last year, Foursquare is one of many location-based applications that allow us to check-in and tell our friends on social networks where we are. While this may seem like just another fad to you, these companies are making some serious headway and more and more of them are popping up every day.

Examples, please?

While these apps all put a different spin on location technology, they all essentially do the same thing —help you find people and places easily.

Gowalla lets you check-in to spots and plan trips, Whrrl lets you comment on photos and join societies, Brightkite helps you meet new people, and buzzd provides real-time ratings of places around you.

I’m not done. GyPSii lets you edit maps, while apps like SCVNGR and MyTown are more like games. Face2face is attempting to succeed on the privacy front.

And let’s not forget about Foursquare.

What makes Foursquare so special? For one, it is the clear frontrunner on the location application scene. Privacy has been a major topic of interest in regards to location-based services and Foursquare is attempting to alleviate some of the concern.

Just recently, Foursquare tweaked its privacy settings and released this statement on their blog:

“It seems that a lot of concerns over information sharing on location-based services arise from confusion over what is shared and where it’s shared, so we’ve put together an explanation of the different ways foursquare uses and shares location information.”

What sets Foursquare apart, though, is its collaboration with major search engines like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. When asked about the latest rumors, Dennis Crowley—Foursquare co-founder —had this to say:

“Our data generates hugely interesting trends which would enrich search. We can anonymise [sic] data and use it to show venues which are trending at that moment. Twitter helped the world and the search engines know what people are talking about. Foursquare would allow people to search for the types of places people are going to—and where is trending—not what.”

What does this have to do with you?

Relax, I’m getting to that part.

The integration of location-based services into social networks and, more importantly our phones, is what will affect us the most.

A large portion of Millennials still don’t use Twitter, but those who do notice that apps like Foursquare are already quite popular. Aside from all the tweets coming from Foursquare and other location apps, Twitter has location tech integrated right into its interface, allowing you and I to share our location with our followers via phone.

Facebook, however, just got in the game.

TNGG writer Jessica Weil recently posted that according to a Forrester report, only 4% of online adults were using location-based networks, but of those active users, almost 70% were between the ages of 19-35. And those numbers are only growing.

Welcome to location technology, Gen Y.