Location-Based Applications and Place-Based Digital Media
The past couple of days I have been keeping up a bit with the South by Southwest show down in Austin, much of whose focus has been placed on the two new up-and-coming location-based applications Gowalla and Foursquare. Apparently, these two apps have been experiencing similar growth patterns and are currently somewhat tied in the race to be “the next killer app.” Competition aside, I want to talk briefly on location-based applications, GPS, and what it all means for place-based media.
Location-Based Applications?
First, we may want to answer the simple question “what are location-based applications?” and “what type of benefit do they give the world?” Let’s see how Gowalla and Foursquare define themselves. Foursquare tells us:
Foursquare on your phone gives you & your friends new ways of exploring your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things.
Similarly, Gowalla’s website states the following:
The easiest way to share your location with friends.
These definitions are almost too simple for what the applications allow you to accomplish. In fact, these definitions remind me of Twitter’s, “what are you doing right now?” A simple tagline of what Twitter is capable of doing, but certainly not an all-encompassing description of the full power of the application.
People use foursquare to “check-in”, which is a way of telling us your whereabouts. When you check-in someplace, we’ll tell your friends where they can find you and recommend places to go & things to do nearby. People check-in at all kind of places – cafes, bars, restaurants, parks, homes, offices.
You’ll find that as your friends use foursquare to check-in, you’ll start learning more about the places they frequent. Not only is it a great way to meet up with nearby friends, but you’ll also start to learn about their favorite spots and the new places they discover.
These applications are for the in-city and worldwide traveler. You can take your GPS enabled smartphone with you and tag places, earn points and input what you thought about the locations you visited. It’s like geocaching on steriods. The reason I like the application more than others is that it gets people out and about discovering new things from national parks to local restaurants in the city. It’s a great way to showcase the world and share opinions of the places people are.
Place-Based Media
For those who have not been geocaching before, you should certainly give it a whirl. It really does not offer much except that it gives you the ability to do something while you are out and about. I personally have enjoyed doing it while riding my bike in more wilderness areas, camping, and just seeing nature. It could certainly be classified as a very “nerdy” activity–especially when you find a cached site that is in the middle of nowhere which might include a barbie head and some old sticks of gum. It makes you feel a bit like a loser for hiking or biking through the wilderness just to find somebody’s garbage. However, it’s more about the experience than the actual “find”–at least that’s what you can tell yourself.
When it comes to more urban areas, waymarking and location-based apps, it’s much easier to drive traffic to and get individuals to visit places when they have been marked by others who have attended or visited. In such high traffic locations, there will certainly be digital signage installed at some future date. And, as technologies marry, you will probably be able to check-in to the place-based display using your mobile device, inputting your opinion on the location with something like Gowalla or Foursquare.
And, of course there remains the discussing of advertising, cross-technologies, and cross-promotion which would take too long to discuss and may be jumping the gun a bit for purposes of our discussion here. I simply wanted to introduce some newer mobile and out-of-home apps that may eventually work well with digital signage technology. Of course, they will not work well in every instance, but can certainly be integrated well in high-traffic, well known urban locations.
Issues
One of the current issues which has garnered quite a bit of attention is the potential of strangers knowing your specific location. This becomes an issue for those who are checking in to specific places that are not their own homes. There is a site dedicated to this issue. It’s called Please Rob Me. If you are a thief and would like to know who is not home so they can be pillaged, you can visit PleaseRobMe to check and see who is out of home.
There are other security and technology integration issues, but if you have no problem with people knowing where you are at all times, then by all means update-away. Otherwise, you can simply give your input to locations without “checking-in” to let everyone know where you are at all times.
Eventually location-based apps will meet place-based media in ways we may not have imagined up previously. Both applications are a perfect match for one another: they both target audiences who are out-and-about, away from home.
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