Reading Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution on UX Matter this morning makes me wondering about the advancements in the location-based services area. Although I agree on the premise ("The true power of the mobile Web lies not merely in providing remote access to data, but in letting users view contextual information relating to location and interact with that information."), the rest is still a rehearsal of past arguments and examples:
"Mobile product innovator Apple showed in its Calamari iPhone ad how a person hungry for calamari can easily find a nearby seafood restaurant (...) Relative location data makes possible the first wave of mobile social networking applications—dodgeball,Loopt, and even the location plug-in for AOL Instant Messenger (AIM)—which inform users when friends or colleagues are in their vicinity. The value of this kind of communication is immediately apparent. I enjoy keeping up with friends and colleagues using LinkedIn or Facebook, but often wish I could have more personal interactions with people in my network rather than just relating in digital space."
Why do I blog this? I wonder about what will be the next generation of location-based services or how to improve the problems users face when employing place-tagging systems or buddy-finder. Although things have been achieved in the academia (and start-up projects), it's as if we had troubles going beyond the current state in gaming (it's all about treasure hunt and object collection), social computing (buddy finder suffer from lots of problem such as market fragmentation, low number of users, privacy tuning issues, etc) or navigation (the restaurant finder example never really took off). My point here is not to criticize this blogpost but rather to show that LBS innovation is VERY slow.