Geolocation has had a tremendous impact on the way we currently live. Many consumers utilize geolocation applications on a daily basis to interact with their friends and associates. Businesses have also found value in geolocation and have used it in marketing efforts to reach their customers.
Are you finding geolocation to be useful to you or your business? Let us know how you’re utilizing it.
Foursquare and Gowalla have been largely responsible for popularizing the idea of geolocation-based services. They combine many elements of other social networks such as the real-time functions of Twitter, the review aspects of sites like Yelp, and the social gaming of many networks, but they add location into the mix, which creates a completely new and exciting space.
Although location-based services are still in the early stages, they appear to be having an influence that is similar to the one that social media has had. According to Jay Adelson, the CEO of SimpleGeo and former CEO of Digg, there have been very few trends that have had relevance across multiple platforms and industries. He believes that social media falls into this select few, as well as location.
“Many of us believed for a long time, even throughout the social media revolution, that location also was one of those topics that would really act like a layer, as social has, on top of all these different applications,” he said.
Because he believes so strongly in this idea, he began working in the location space with SimpleGeo, a company that enables developers to easily make location-aware apps. The company has released 3 products since its launch last year including SimpleGeo Context, SimpleGeo Places, and most recently, SimpleGeo Storage.
The Storage platform ties the products together in a way that supports any type of location-aware app. Through Storage, SimpleGeo offers developers a complete infrastructure solution to build location apps.
“Applying that same technology theory that was used to solve some of the social media problems of real-time data in the social Web from companies like Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, Digg, we’ve been able to take some of those lessons learned… and apply it to a geo-spatial problem,” he said.
As SimpleGeo further innovates, we will likely see more location-based apps and developments emerge and integrate into our lives. With this in mind, do you think that location has the potential to impact us in the same way that social media has?