Early last year I reminisced about a series of books / games from my kids childhood called "Where's Waldo", where a happily nerdy cartoon character named Waldo is effectively concealed within a mass of other caricatures. The goal is to just find him. Scenes from busy streets challenge the reader to find the face of Waldo among a barrage of other pedestrians, street hawkers, and the like. In the context of my previous post I compared Social Networking to that children’s series.
Today I am making a brief reprise of the story in conjunction with the release of "Latitude", the latest tool from Google for mobile devices that puts an icon of you on a google map. The blogosphere was abuzz with numerous articles, as well as with publications and news services such as AP and the Wall Street Journal.
Not to be one to jump on the bandwagon of re-broadcasting the release as so many writers have, I prefer to delve in to the thought process of Google and the users of this service in an attempt to try and "get it". With all due respect for the engineers that created this tool I am still trying to think about what would be a good use for this information.
I guess there is the entertainment value in a sanitized voyeuristic sense. From the same person who would "un-hide" their location for continuous display, does that border on a being a watered down version of changing clothes in front of a window with the curtain open. Or possibly is it to support narcissists who are spouting their "Hey, look at me!" attitude to life.
From a business point of view, will this lead to virtual sales bots that will be trolling the sites alerting proprietors of local businesses? Quick, "Joe" is heading down the sidewalk - let's send a whiff of his favorite stew to the street to try and achieve a Pavlovian response.
Let's contrast this to a service such as Twitter which in effect can provide the same location data to Latitude. Both services are in effect "opt in". You can choose to blast every thought that pops into your head to your "twitter followers" or in this example you can tell everyone "Having a latte at SBUX at Peachtree and 17th". With Latitude, you are "choosing" to display your location, maybe without the "foam". Either way there has been a conscious decision to inform others. Or has there?
With Twitter, you have to type in where you are - consciously. There is no automated “tweet” for that (yet - but maybe I will work on that next). With Latitude, you are given the option for this to be automatically shared. So envision this:
You are an avid social networker and freely release your personal information to all your "friends" you have found on Facebook. You come home one day to see your computer, plasma TV, and all your other expensive toys missing. Oops, I guess Sam the burglar wasn't your "friend" after all since he checked his Latitude and saw that you were sipping coffee on the opposite side of town. He used his Google calculator to figure out how much time he needed to clean out the place before you reach home.
While this is unlikely to happen, it is not outside of the realm of possibility. There are probably more opportunities for simple embarrassment like when your boss checks his Latitude to find out where you have been (the 3 hour “lunch meeting” at the local strip club).
Either way, the true usefulness of this tool in a business sense still needs to be revealed. You can sit back and say to yourself, “Imagine the commercial possibilities...”. When you come up with something please post back to this blog with those results.
