The Power of Proximity – location technologies for disruptive business applications PART I
Most recently a new breed of social services have caught our imagination. They go by the name of location-aware social utilities (LASU) or location based social networks.
Location is a critical asset, a fundamental dimension any marketer should think about when addressing its core audiences.
The reason it matters for any company/brand trying to get their messages to their core audience is simple: location starts with the consumer. I’ll refer to it as ‘proximity’ and goes beyond the most puristic definition of ‘being close in space’.
The reason I want to talk about it is that we have evidence of approaching the tipping point of the innovation curve – in this field.
We all live in a flux of social interactions, communication streams have multipied with the advent of multi-media and doubled down in scope with the internet and the web.
The array of digital devices available to us has made it incredibly easy to access information, consume & create media, produce knowledge and (perhaps most notably) helped us share. ‘Social networks’ have only ‘recently’ hit main stream but really they have been around from the pre-history of the Internet.
What social networks (or social utilities) have done is to augment the ability of each one of us to communicate – in a synchronous and asynchronous way – to one or many of our families/ friends/ co-workers and business partners.
We all have multiple accounts to linkedin, facebook, myspace, yahoo groups, friendster, bebo (depending on latitude and demo) because we all find them helpful tools (utilities) to connect with our tribes.
Many of them – our tribes – are dispersed throughout the globe, many of them are just across the street or in the same office as us. In one powerful & elegant way web enabled social utilities have given us the gift of portability of our tribes. Wherever we are, however we feel, we can check in our facebook or flickr account and feel more connected to our community/ies.
Posting photos of the grand canyon or the big wall of china on flickr whilst traveling and getting almost-simultaneous responses from people that are sitting 2,000 miles away from you isn’t bad. It can’t be bad. It’s like sending a real-time postcard and get immediate feedback from the people you care. That’s what I call the Power of Proximity.
If this argument doesn’t convince you, look no further than a seminal example of what proximity means. Twitter is a relatively young, early stage social utility. Throughout 2008 it has showed some pearls of its – yet unrealized – potential. Only popular amongst the digerati at first, it moved quickly to the world of celebrities – the latter probably signing the shift, the tipping point from utility of an elite to a mass utility.
Twitter creates Proximity by means of regular/short updates about what you are doing now. Social Proximity is real because it’s about sharing and connectedness.
Twitter was used as the first means of social news dissemination of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, witnessing Obama’s run for president and reporting the almost real-time landing of a plane in the Hudson river in NY – bringing people together, making them feel nearer to where events were unfolding.
Although lacking spatial attributes (vicinity), this type of proximity is very powerful. It’s the glue to communities and social interactions on the web. And it isn’t surprising that to-date – some 20 some years after the inception of the commercial web – nobody has really done anything to add the dimension of ‘vicinity’ until very recently (Yelp, Qype, LocalGroups for example started walking in the right direction).
The web has broken down the spatial boundaries of commerce, communication and interaction by providing an effective and efficient platform for carrying out those activities regardless of your geographies.
The first law of geography (by Waldo Tobler) goes : “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things.”. Apart from its interconnection with the law of demand (in that interactions between places are inversely proportional to the cost of travel between them, which is much like the probability of purchasing a good is inversely proportional to the cost), the first law of geography is relevant on the web because in many ways it serves as an amplifier to social proximity.
What if we start adding vicinity to social proximity – what if you could know that on your way to the local veg market in an urban area (like London) you could look no further than your pocket to find that your good friend David is also shopping nearby and you could invite him for a quick bite? What if as you walk across the city a stream of events, news, stories would appear on your mobile device telling you what’s relevant that has happened nearby, right there where you walk.
Sure this risks to resonate like 1984 and probably will start ringing some bells and privacy concerns but provided that you – the consumer – decide at any time how and when to make your geo-location available to your friends & communities this should help replace “fear” with “empowerment”.
You line up vicinity + social proximity + immediacy into an elegant blend – you produce something that is both extremely powerful and terribly exciting.
When I started researching in this area I was firstly amazed at the fact that neither google nor yahoo or most notably facebook & twitter had not added a feature that would expose spatial proximity (vicinity).
And until recently, technological barriers (i.e. low penetration of GPS enabled phone + high cost of internet data packages) had made it difficult to justify any heavy investment in this area.
This has started to change. Jumpstarting its ‘open strategy’ for mobile devices Yahoo has launched a number of initiatives aimed at leveraging the opportunity of proximity. Engineers behind Fire Eagle realized that by creating a standard for localization services not only Yahoo can layer in its applications across its roster of content and communication properties but also ignite innovation allowing a multitude of outside developers to build apps onto the platform that would leverage location-based services.
Within a year Silicon Valley, NYC and Europe prime innovation scenes have given birth to Brightkyte, Loopt, Aka-Aki, Mobnotes, Rummble, Geo-Twitter, Firefone etc…and google launched ‘latitude’.
I will cover some of these services in my next post.
to be continued…
Techmatic 
Leave a comment