As anticipated, location-sharing services were the talk of the town in Austin as engineers and entrepreneurs convened for the South by Southwest Interactive festival.
“Location, location location,” Playfish chief operating officer Sebastien de Halleux told me when I caught up with him. “It’s a big theme for the web at this stage.”
That may be true. But despite the genuine promise of location-based services, and all the hype around the budding rivalry between Foursquare and Gowalla — rival applications that let users “check-in” and share their location with friends — this stuff is still a long way from being mainstream.
Part of the problem is that neither service has hit that exponential growth curve that made Facebook and Twitter household names. Perhaps we’re approaching that tipping point; Foursquare just added 100,000 users in ten days.
More likely though, there are just enough early adopters and curiosity seekers to get a new web service a half million or so users. It remains to be seen how sticky these services are, and if users keep flocking to them after SXSW.
Services that broadcast a user’s location to the world — whether they be Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Buzz, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter — also skirt dangerously close to serious breaches of privacy. Though there have been no documented crimes perpetrated because of information gleaned from a check-in, sites like PleaseRobMe are calling attention to the risks of over-sharing.
Danah Boyd touched on this in her keynote address to the technologists at SXSW. “How you handle the challenges of privacy . . . will affect a generation,” she said. “Make sure you are creating a world you want to live in.”
Yet despite the risks of over-sharing and cautionary words from leaders in the field, many of the companies on display in Austin were rushing ahead to build out the location-based web. Hot Potato is a new service that allows Foursquare users to create discreet chat rooms around real-world events. Foodspotting lets users take pictures of their favourite restaurant meals and share them with a community that is integrated with Foursquare.
With this kind of momentum, building companies that help users make the most out of sharing their location looks set to be a prominent theme for many months to come. And at a certain point, this crop of companies will either prove their worth as more users sign on, or fizzle out.
Amidst all the hype, it was slightly reassuring to hear Josh Williams, Gowalla chief executive, acknowledge that location-sharing services, including his own, still have a way to go before they prove their true worth. “The question we have to ask ourselves is, ‘Is what we’re doing today going to be meaningful in five or ten years,’” he told me. “If it isn’t, then we need to re-evaluate.”
