Since the beginning of the LBS revolution, many people have questioned the long-term viability of the concept from a usage standpoint. A long-standing argument has centered around whether the act of “checking-in” via LBS apps like Foursquare and Gowalla will ever hit the mainstream.
It doesn’t help the cause when research is continually published indicating that just 1-4% of all connected users actively engage with an LBS app. The fact remains that a majority of users wont use such apps over the long-term unless it provides unique value. Rather than checking in simply for the sake of checking in, users will demand something in return. LBS providers are slowly fulfilling that demand, which is why the future of LBS is as bright as ever.
In this week’s Webby Debate on the future of social media, Gary Vaynerchuk — host of Wine Library TV and social media strategist — went toe to toe with TechCrunch’s Paul Carr on the future of location-based services. Carr, who has publicly dismissed location-based services like Foursquare for its users checking in “without a very clear reason for doing it,” takes on Gary Vee who possesses a much more positive outlook on the concept. The snippet LBS is below, followed by Webby’s “Social Media is Overrated” debate in its entirety, which is definitely worth a watch.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVYlC-rK6zE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eG-35pV3xo[/youtube]
Nearbyfeed
Interesting video, thanks for sharing your idea. As pointed out by you, one of the big problems with current LBS is how to provide more value than simply asking people to “check-in”. Once the novelty of checkin for badge wears off, people get bored to use Foursquare-like LBS.
Ideally, at first, LBS should provide users with value-added information, such as nearby breaking news, deal, promotions, interesting people, places recommended by others, and the like, at the right time at the right place. Secondly, LBS should NOT overwhelm the user with lots of information of little interest to the users (for example, twitter’s user usually receives many tweets of little interest to him from their following users), in another word, LBS needs to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, so that users can easily focus on information of interest to them (in particular, user has different interest, one information may be interesting to user A, but may be no interest at all to user B).
more detail can be found in my post:
Opportunities and Problems of Foursquare-like LBS http://nearbyfeed.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/opport…