I’m giving a presentation tonight at Umass Boston about LBS and geolocation apps. It’s suppose to stay pretty basic but I’m going to have a hard time not going on a tangent about how it was a giant botched and/or missed opportunity for marketers.
If you were at SXSW Interactive around 2009/2010 geolocation apps were all anyone was talking about. Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, everyone had one and everyone was getting crazy amounts of funding. The problem was, the apps were pushed out to be the first, not to be the best. Gowalla is the example that most people will know of that pivoted so many times, that their users got fed up with them and eventually they were sold to Facebook who shut the whole service down in March of this year. Foursquare saw huge growth from 2010 to 2011 but has not entered into a plateau of members because the game has gotten old.
Gamification is the current word that everyone is using but usefulness and practicality is what needs to be thought through. Services like Uber which show the location of taxis and limos close to you and even Grindr which maps out men looking for a hookup are connecting the web with the world instead of the world with the web.
Maybe this covers my rant for the day.
MichaelJAwesome 