These questions came across my Twitter stream asking what location service should they use, why that particular one and who should they share intimate location details with as compared to general or no one at all. After pondering all the location services I use, who is on them and why I use them, it was far beyond 140 characters. I found that I dabble in many of the location services, but focus on only a few and for different reasons. Digging in, each offers alternates to just sharing. However, many of the contacts tend to be the same across them all.
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Brightkite – Still the leader in my eyes, this service adds functionality to location awareness through an iPhone app, Droid app, Blackberry app and even mobile web interface. While there is no magic mayorship or badges like Foursquare, the integration of comments, Twitter and Flickr make it a win. Brightkite then raised the bar with their wall application that allows you to specify a place and publish all the checkins, tweets, comments and photos going on at that exact place or a radius. Tags can also be included.
Notifications of what your friends are doing can be sent via SMS or emailed to you, or simply viewed on the web. They have a range of security settings from fans to friends and how exact they can see you. The fans portion follows along the Facebook idea that someone wants to know more about you or find you but you really have not become friends with this person enough to want to see their information as well.
Google Latitude – Google always seems to hint at things to come with each new service, yet slowly rolls them out instead of a big splash. Latitude has been compared to Brightkite (I myself did some comparisons) but doesn’t quite meet the expectation of the possibilities it could have. Latitude is full of security settings and icons allowing you to tweak who can see you at what level globally or individually.
One of the key tings to know about Latitude is how it integrates with your Google network and what you are sharing to each individual person. Establishing levels for the public and trusted friends is a key portion of managing this service.
Foursquare – while it is a location service it is also part game. You are able to see where someone last checked in (if they allow), but you earn badges and points for finding new places and checking in multiple times. Not only multiple places but daily but also to the same place over time. Each week a leaderboard of points is established and people fight to get to the top, for seemingly no reason.
You are able to suggest merges of places that look like duplicates, suggest places have closed and even become a superuser with edit rights over time. This allows you to change addresses, cross streets, phone numbers and even Twitter id’s of the site. One benefit that should be extended to mobile users is the ability to tag places as you create or check into them. This helps grow what you are searching for and makes the service useful on finding places for a topic based on your friend network. Such as a bar, pool hall or even library that might be close by.
Plazes – a sleeper that has been around for years. Now that they have been bought by Nokia, when I say sleeper I don’t mean as in closing down. But as in great promise that is still not recognized. I have been using them for some time now and had their location service placed prominently on my blog. There was always a race to be the first to Plaze a new location, but with the numerous location apps coming out they all are losing focus. One unique item for their service is the ability to check into a place now and even at future times, laying out your location. If they could tie this to sites like TripIt, it would save me great effort.
Each checkin has a default privacy setting and also the ability to change it upon plazing. This allows you to control what gets shown to the public and your extended network. They do have a desktop application, but more mobile interfaces are needed to help it continue to grow. With the Nokia integration, I imagine we might see more of this soon enough.
Fire Eagle - I left them for the end since most people don’t know about the service itself. Backed and started by Yahoo, it is the glue behind many sites that would allow you to check in once and then auto-populate the other sites Much like a Ping.fm for social micro-blogs. There are many applications that use Fire Eagle and they do have a simple mobile website.
Fire Eagle allows you to hide yourself from all application, and even [purge your entire history. None of the others offered that from what I read or could find. Fire Eagle also reads Dopplr to get updates , BrightKite, a desktop widget on OSX, Navison and more.
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So how do you choose which application, much less what security levels? This is where common sense plays a major role as well as how you handle automatic updating of your location itself. I follow a simple premise to begin each time I enter a new location service. I make all location updates manual to control when and if I choose to post. From there I build my list of friends and decide who gets to see what portion of my location if the service allows it.
Security controls is the most important step as you can sign up for any of the location services. Many are now requiring, or not telling you up front, they are accessing GPS information in your device and broadcasting it back.
I go by the simple mantra of when I am planning on being in public mode I broadcast my exact location and often. When I leave that mode I treat my location as private and may not update for periods of time or at all. Pay close attention to how each service decides to allow granular control on sharing abilities. If there is no granularity, then I suggest only using the service when you want to be seen or changing to a new service entirely. There are too many opportunities out there to participate in varying services to allow yourself to breach security.
