Location’s Social Paradox

There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now. Companies are getting funded left and right, new ones are popping up daily, and certain ones are seemingly starting to take off. But for a number of them, there’s a very big wall looming. And the more popular they get, the quicker they’ll reach it. A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox.

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