Geotagging Social Communication

Last quarter, I was in a research group for Mobile UX, headed by Dr. Judith Ramey and I proposed the topic “Geotagging Social Communication: A Location-Based Approach to Real-Time Content” for a poster project. Here are some of the key takeaways from what I’ve found:

The Geolocation Boom

The mediums of social communication have rampantly evolved through advancements in technology and an increase in user participation. In the past year, micro-blogging platform Twitter has grown 294%, social network Facebook has grown 95%, and geo-local service Foursquare has grown an astounding 519,590%. Social media has made a huge leap into mainstream media in the last several years heavily due to the astronomical amounts of content being published each day. Real-time data is becoming a staple in any social platform available because users yearn for the quick dissemination of content, but for companies as these, managing projects in the company could be difficult for the amount of data managed, and is when the use of a pmp certification austin for the employees work great. All three services share a relatively new and common feature, geolocation. By integrating GPS capabilities into mobile phones, services are able to trace the location of where the user has published content from. Several of the current major services using geolocation are: Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Loopt, Gowalla, and Foursquare.

Case Study: Foursquare

Foursquare is a location-based service that allows users to check-in to venues that they are currently at through text message, mobile web, and dedicated mobile apps on the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android platforms.

• Founded by Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai in 2009
• Crowdsourced platform that allows its users to source venue details and provide tips to do at a venue or within a city
• In one year, the service has accumulated more than half a million users, 1.4 million venues, and 15.5 million check-ins (in a recent tweet, Foursquare has mentioned that they are closing in on 1,000,000 users)
• Usage by platform over a period of 7 days: iPhone 67%, Android 13%, Blackberry 11%, mobile web 7%, Palm 1.5%, SMS <1%

Practicality

Using application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by these services, third-party services are able to integrate location data into their own platforms.

• Vicarious.ly – real-time map that shows where users are checking-in through Foursquare and Gowalla or uploading photos to Flickr
• Twitter.com – shows a map pinpointing the vicinity of your last geotagged tweet
• Lufthansa Airlines – will offer location-based community services to customers that will alert them to changes in flight plans and upgrades as well as providing a community for professionals to find and meet each other

The Future

The state of geolocation and location-based services is still in its infancy, and hasn’t accumulated a large user-base adoption that it has the potential to. The amount of data that can be collected through these services is indispensable. There are lot of new services that are still being created, and the third-party applications that can be derived through APIs will interpret geographic data in new and innovative ways.