You Don't Need To Know Where This Rant Was Written

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

Location-based services are all the rage. Mobile computing allows people to work from anywhere. Now, with GMail's new location based signature labs feature, people will know where you were working. Wow! This is fantastic! Now, anyone I e-mail will know that I am working from home or even at the beach! If you can not read the sarcasm, then let me tell you that I just do not understand why we need this. Thankfully, I am not alone in this feeling.

Svetlana Gladkova of Profy worries because email one of the few places you can still hide from people.

"Of course you certainly don’t have to use this feature and since it is in Labs you should be pretty determined to share your location with anyone you send emails to in order to activate it. But experience shows that the ideas that are born at Google first will eventually turn into wildly popular and used applications that many people will rely on for whatever purposes they may and this will make it much more difficult to hide behind your e-mail address in the future."

Even ReadWriteWeb's coverage questions why people would want to use it.

"Why would you want to do this? Maybe you want to highlight your jetsetting lifestyle. Maybe you want to remind the recipient that you're in a different time zone. Or you might just want to use it as a mnemonic device for searching sent e-mail based on the location from where it was sent."

Google is obviously making a very big move into location-based services. They recently launched Latitude, their location sharing service. Their are other location sharing services as well. Brightkite and Loopt seem to be the most popular or at least the most hyped. The real question is why do people feel that sharing their location is helpful?

I can understand that people may want to know who is currently in their city or who lives in the same general location, but that information can typically be found through most social networks or the social event and travel sites like Upcoming and Dopplr.

So, why do we need to know who is near at every moment? Outside of the coolness factor, what problem do these services solve? I can understand that UPS may want to know where their trucks are, but that can be solved using basic GPS hardware and applications. What benefit do people really get by knowing where people in their network may be in their town? I just do not get it, but maybe I am just being too practical.

Image by onebutan-iphone
Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

Why Google Latitude is Viral Marketing for Brightkite, Loopt

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

"They're more about keeping tabs on your friends; we focus more on community and meeting new people based on the places you go." - Brightkite

There's no doubt that mobile social networks are vying to be the next big thing for consumers as the mobile handset arena heats up. Plenty of services have gotten their feet wet, but haven't really made it outside of the early adopter crowd. So it comes as no surprise that early adopters and techies are wondering if mobiles services such as Loopt and Brightkite should be worried about Google's latest product: Google Latitude.

In one sentence, Latitude is Google's location awareness application. It's geared to take over a niche that's been dominated by other aforementioned services for quite sometime now. The million dollar bubble buster is whether the competition should be threatened. Short answer: no.

We recommend reading ReadWriteWeb's take on Latitude.

Keeping The Community: Different Strokes For Different Folks

In The Community is What Makes Social Networks Different), I said, "The community is the key to separating social networks."

This is why I'd still choose Brightkite over Latitude. For me, it's not about showing where I am to all of my friends and contacts. Quite frankly, the ones that can meet up with me are probably already there or on the way. How do I know? I checked my text messages, posted where I was going as my Facebook status, and made a few phone calls to those who could meet up. Neither I nor my friends need Latitude or Google to do this for us. Latitude might be a backwards way of being lazy if you ask me.

Brightkite introduces me to new people to hang out with. This may not be for everyone, but it's a great way for people to network right in their community. The amount of information available for specific check-in spots is amazing! I can see who's been there, how many times they've been there, check out their profile and see if we have similar interests. Hey, they might even be friends with me on Twitter! For this sole reason alone, Brightkite and other similar services have nothing to fear for now. In fact, they might want to thank Google.

Google Latitude Is Viral Marketing For The Location-Awareness Arena

Google is a worldwide brand. It's highly respected among people who would actually use Latitude. The entire situation puts way more light on mobile social networks and location awareness than the smaller players could ever do at this point. Google pushes this concept to mainstream internet users, just as Facebook has done with RSS via the News Feed. The usage of each service will be entirely different, but the concept is still the same at the core: connect wherever you are!

This could be looked at as viral marketing for location-awareness services. Google may or may not get the bigger market share, but there's no doubt that quite a few people may fill unfilled with Google Latitude and leave in search of more features or a different way of interacting with the same concept. Google could add these features in the future, but remains to be seen at this point. There's a lot of things that Google keeps putting on the backburner. In the long run Latitude could be one of them, making room for others to dominate the space.

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.