A Feature of Latitude

Eventually, all early tech innovations become common features of larger tech innovations. It's a natural, often disruptive development in market maturation cycles.

In the LBS space, this happened first with infrastructure.  Early LBS gear innovations for wireless networks eventually bumped up against packaged infrastructure offerings with included mobile positioning centers as a feature of whole-system infrastructure offerings.    

Content was next. If you were developing an app in the early part of this decade, you recall the pains of licensing map data and GIS platforms directly.  You had to build your IT infrastructure backend to support mobile applications. It was an expensive process and major barrier to entry.  That all changed when the first commercial Web services platforms arose, eliminating commercial mapping content licensing stress, and turning these data into an Intel-inside kind of feature.  

Then, we saw tracking 'applications' become features of larger field force automation applications, where tracking was just a means to an end feature in support of larger service oriented architectures using many systems in concert to solve business mobility problems.  

Next, (and quite recently) we've seen dedicated GPS chipsets become features of full system-on-a-chip 3G offerings now including GPS by default in newer platforms.  

Then, (and also quite recently) we've watched mobile navigation 'applications' evolve from billed-for mobile consumables to become common features of mobility, now offered free, as a feature of a mobile data bundle - just like texting, browsing, and voicemail for example.  And, we've also seen point-of-interest/find-the nearest "apps" become a feature of Search (the Local variety). 

Now, mobile social networking 'applications' are becoming features too.  Seth Godin recently said:

Twitter is a protocol, of course, not a company or even a platform.

I think about this and Latitude in the same sentence, and I don't see a new Google friend-finder app (which btw is really addictive on Blackberry), but rather, I see a new feature; a feature of Google Maps for mobile and custom social networking tools yet to be built for our own corporate and personal networking purposes. 

Comments

[ben]

I think you're right that they won't come out with their own full social networking application totally around location like a Loopt, which would be kinda silly for someone like Google at this point. But it did seem a bit surprising that it doesn't seem to be integrated into Orkut (at least not yet). Location seems a logical extension to email contacts (more info on those you're already in contact with) and also a logical extension to finding stuff on a map (find stuff around you why not find people as well) . But its undoubtedly also a logical extension of socializing and social networking, so seems a bit odd that they'd bypass the low hangng fruit there with their own social network, seems like such an obvious piece. My guess is either its still coming, or they have something bigger in mind...

[Jon]

Ben - I look at twitter and it's out of control. Some people I follow have over 10K followers. I don't know anyone who knows 10K people. I think what Google can do is introduce some order and get rid of the insanity by allowing small groups (or businesses) to create their own closed-loop social networks. Jaiku is built exactly for that and if combined with Latitude, it would introduce quite a powerful fix to the madness. I guess my post didn't communicate this well,but that's where my thoughts are.

[ben]

Interesting. I am a relatively new user of twitter, so I am probably doing it wrong :-) but I started off trying to follow only people I knew and then found myself adding folks that either seemed interested in the same stuff I am (using their eyes and ears to keep on top of stuff like LBS events, of a certain college football team etc), or people that I wanted to aspire to be more like (successfull entrepreneurs) or people that just seemed up to interesting stuff (celebs, journalist etc). It only overlaps w/ my other online social networks by a few dozen people.

Agreed that it sure as heck can use some organization, loaded up tweetie for iPhone last night and was hoping that would help, it has a couple of cool features like a proximity feature that I could see being very cool in some scenarios... certainly is nice to have the option to slice and dice through tweets on a variety of different levels including geo... but maybe its b/c Ilive in super dense urban area of midtown manhattan... but looking at all the tweets in a 1 mile radius last night was just white noise of randomness that didn't do much for me, but I think it will be cool.