Location Proximity Intelligence
May 13th, 2008 by David Stone. No Comments »Location Based Services (LBS’s) for the most part are still trying to find their feet, nothing has really taken off- at least in the social network space. Late last week I was all over the place; Brighton on Tuesday & Wednesday; London on Thursday; Menorca on Friday; and I arrived back last night. All perfect situations to use LBS’s, but nothing. Dopplr and Google Maps on my iPhone was the closest to an LBS that I used.
I was wondering why the lack of traction among LBS’s and I decided it’s because so far they all suck (please prove me wrong). The biggest reason for them sucking is their proximity intelligence- or lack of it. Enter what I’m calling Location Proximity Intelligence, LPI.
LPI is about contextual proximity. If you live in San Francisco and visit London, and I live in Brighton (an hour on train from London), I want to know. You are not in my proximity, but you’ve covered probably above 99% of the distance to my proximity. The Location Proximity Intelligence concept is based around this proximity increase percentage. There very well might be something out there like this already under a different name, if so, I couldn’t find it.
Once social Location Based Services seriously understand Mobile Attention Profiling [1], and Location Proximity Intelligence we might have something cool to play with. Until then it seems they’ll carry on sucking.
[1] I couldn’t find anything about Mobile Attention Profiling, if you know of anything please let me know.