Location Proximity Intelligence
May 13th, 2008 by Dave. 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.