December 24, 2009

Dopplr, Whrrld, FourSquare, SimpleGeo, GeoAPI, Layar - welcome to the burgeoning world of location oriented services.

As I write this, GeoAPI has been acquired by Twitter to offer users the ability to share location with their social network and for customers to get access to a fire-hose of geo-social content that they can mine for a number of contexts. When it comes to Layar, I think their management seems to have missed a trick by seeing Augmented Reality as an independent service.

The problem with having to be a “layar” on the Layar “browser” is that coupling AR capabilities with the actual business you are running becomes impossible. With Layar 3.0 you could use their browser specific environment to build password protected Layars and forms. Not worth betting the house on in my opinion.

It might work well for Yelp for example - but doesn’t really work great for companies wanting to offer a rich, interactive and customized AR experience coupled with other platform specific features such as sound/video/picture/accelerometer.

SimpleGeo picked up on that opportunity and now plans to offer a solid platform for companies to embed and integrate. I think their “sticky” MO is that usage of their API requires use of their cloud infrastructure. All things considered, this is the more appealing model for wide-scale adoption of location oriented services.

Twitter’s purchase of GeoAPI is of interest to my own start-up, CiviGuard. Being able to ask the Twitterverse “Is subject X happening in Location(s) Y?” and getting a response is a great value-add for our CiviCommand decision execution component. Anything we can do to support Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) with quality information (vs. noise) is a benefit.

Twitter’s MO behind the acquisition was probably to counter the hot new thing in the location social space - FourSquare. I think it is going to be a solid counter and Twitter tends to integrate technology from acquisitions pretty quickly - Summize being a prime example.

All in all - this is great momentum for the location oriented services space - as far as I am concerned - the more the better. Expect Google to couple Latitude with Wave in the near future, I also won’t be surprised to see a quality AR API being added to Android so that it is supported natively.

Facebook - the internet identity king is in an interesting position because the credibility of a given profile can be corroborated by the person’s site affiliations and general web behavior. For most of the identities on Facebook, a cache containing their profile, their social graph, the sites they have used FB IDs for and their Google/Bing search results can be used to assign a reputation rating.

The higher the reputation, the more weight their location aware comment carries - and the more some search engine (or reputation agent) in the future will want to corroborate such information. Such agents and engines are bound to go mainstream because there is only so much semantic marking with RDF triples, FOAF and semantic querying with SPARQL can do.

Compellng times indeed.

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