ICH MARKE DU JANE

A couple weeks back, during my morning caffeine fix cum Reader blog headline scroll, I read about Google Latitude. And thought: „woo hoo – finally!“ Followed up by more joy: Google was enabling the service across 26 countries, it would work on the mobile or the desktop and there would be the ability to specify privacy preferences at multiple levels and in multiple ways. Sounding good. In the past, I’ve been excited to read about services like Dodgeball (recently killed by Google) and Loopt (only available in the US), similar services tying geo targetting capabilities to social networks. A couple German near-equivalents have sparked a lot of interest for me as well – Qiro and Aka-Aki. But because of the walled-garden approach, I haven’t found them very useful thus far because my friends and acquaintences are not using those services. So, a quick email of the article to one of my Sapient colleagues with the request that he sign up immediately so we could test it out. Torsten emailed me back right away: „yup, read about it already from a tweet a few hours back – Julie, please start using Twitter more“ (hrmph!)

But, if I’m going to be honest, enthusiasm quickly waned. There were a few problems. Most critically, while Google reassures that the service will be available shortly for the iPhone (hey, Google, heads-up! aka-aki just came out with its iPhone app), it’s not yet. And that’s what I use. Resolved to try it out on the desktop in the interim, I signed up for the service and hooked a Latitude window into my iGoogle page so I could theoretically watch my friends as they wander around the world. I invited about 20 friends from five countries to join me in Latitude. Was disappointed a second time to note that Latitude only works with friends who have a gmail ID (am guessing this will change soon). And finally, for about half of my local German friends, there was no problem getting the service to work on their desktops, but for half, the service strangely flaked and they were told that it wouldn’t work in their location, but that they could try it on their mobile phones. (Still buggy? Firewall issues?)

Why such interest? „Why, in fact,“ as close friends and family are quick to point out, „do I want to give Google access to such personal information?“ Indeed, if I think of Cory Doctorow’s now infamous story, Scroogled, it’s hard not to think twice about making my whereabouts at any given moment available to Google. (Yeah, I have a love/hate relationship with Google, but doesn’t everyone these days?) But there is another side of me that sees the magic shining through from behind the menace. Perhaps I like the romanticism behind the idea of Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map: translated to modern-day Munich, I can simply know where my friends are and use this information spontaneously – for instance, to invite someone to join me for lunch at a nearby restaurant or to sms a „good luck“ message to a colleague if I see them approaching the location of a client. (I know, I know, the naysayers out there are thinking more along the lines of Gossip Girl evilness or mobile spy stalking, but I say: „hush!“) Social networking aside, I really like what blogger John Battelle has to say about the business implications of this kind of service: „if you don’t think there is a business model here, you’re not paying attention. Location + personal data + friend network + AdWords = major commerce and marketing opportunity. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are all circling this model. First to act like a media company wins.“ As a social media and marketing strategist for Sapient, I’m waiting (and pushing) for clients to jump in head first and experiment. And some are.

I think that the race has finally begun. What do you think?

Tags: google, lbs, location, social networks

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2009 at 19:26 and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.