FindWhere and Geoff Livingston’s Mobile Manifesto

06.04.08 | 1 Comment | by: Dave Jeyes

Jaap Groot, CEO of FindWhere which makes the Buddyfinder service Livecontacts and Geoff Livingston, author of Now is Gone just released a manifesto entitled Breaking Through: The Local, Mobile and Social Manifesto. They’re proposing the steps necessary to win in integrating location-based services into the social web.

Here are their 8 tenants of their strategy for being mobile, local and social:

  1. Provide a base offering free of charge. Today’s social network user does not tolerate paid-for services.
  2. Work on a wide selection of phones.
  3. Offer an intelligent, simple user interface for accessing information.
  4. Use GPS rather than force users to manually enter their location every time.
  5. Integrate intelligently into existing social networks rather than further inundate people with a new one.
  6. Allow users to share and use their location data in as many ways as possible.
  7. Enable individuals to set various levels of privacy control for personal security.
  8. Monetize in an intelligent, non-intrusive way

Overall, I think they’ve hit the nail on the head. In order for mobile location to take off it has to easily bridge between desktops and handsets, be portable across various services and give users the ability to syndicate their personal and location information across the web. This is an excellent playbook for companies looking to implement location-based services in terms of both the mobile web and social networking.

The one thing that I think could be added to their manifesto is the core value of adding location features to social applications. One word really sums up the reason that Location-Based Services will dramatically change the web and spread mobile web usage like wildfire.

Context.

Context is the reason that adding location information to the web is fundamentally useful. Location allows us to see not only what our friends are doing like Facebook’s status, but also where they are located. Imagine going to a concert and getting alerts that your friends are also there. The possibilities of location services begin to take new meaning when you look at them in terms of context.

Other examples of adding location to every day tools from the standpoint of context:

  • IM Services: Mobile phone IM clients help users communicate with friends in real-time and location data can increase usefulness and add value to the conversation.
  • Status: Including your location automatically in Twitter or Facebook’s status updates can communicate so much more if it’s automatic
  • Events: Being able to see whether you know anyone at an event can help get people out into the real world by starting the conversation
  • Places: Imagine going to a web site that knows where you are and can tell you the most highly recommended restaurants around you based on reviews or your own friends’ ratings.

These are all services that become so much more useful and usable when they already know your real-time location. Now we can look at mobile and location in terms of their ability to add context to all of the things we already do online and the possibilities really start to open up.

How else can we use location information on the web to provide context and bring people together online?

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