56% of smartphone owners surveyed said they knew about these services and 39% of respondents said they used them. Facebook Places was the clear leader among users (42%) with Latitude (27%) and Foursquare (25%) tied somewhere behind. The biggest barriers to use among non-users? Privacy concerns and lack of clear benefit. Graphs below.

The White Horse survey includes 11 other charts and graphs and a number of recommendations. All of this has to be taken with a grain of salt, of course, because it's a firm that does web design and marketing as a service. That 39% of respondents surveyed said they knew about and used location based services seems to me a high number, reason to be optimistic, not as the survey's title says any indication that the sector is broken. None the less (see my disclosure below), the data is quite interesting and the recommendations are thought provoking and well articulated.

Included in those recommendations are the following:

• Companies interested in reaching potential consumers using location based services should build their own, rather than emphasize participation in existing services, because existing services add too little to the core social networking features they duplicate from Facebook, Twitter or the good old fashioned telephone.


• Companies should seek to fullfil new social functions with location apps, not just communication. That's already covered. "Marketers will need to posit experiences & goals that make sense for their particular brands to endorse, build appropriate interactions, and test rewards and incentives," the report says.


• Build a social media presence first. "...success will depend on engaging those customers who are most active in social media, based on an understanding of their 'native' social experiences in existing communities, whether physical or digital. To think that users will adopt a branded geolocation app that is unmoored from existing social experiences is not realistic."


• Privacy: "Currently, geolocation apps handle data in ways that consumers can neither understand nor control."


• Model after Foursquare but keep an eye on Facebook. I'm not entirely clear on what this recommendation means.

Readers interested in the location based social networking use cases and avoidance should check out our coverage including Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks, 2011: The Year the Check-in Died, Check-ins Are Dead? Location App Life360 Adds 1 Million Users in 10 Weeks.

Disclosure: I happen to be on an Advisory Board for White Horse design, but I missed the email when this report was sent out and just saw it written up tonight on the independent blog Marketing Pilgrim. I would have written about this report whether I had any connection to the company or not (I love this stuff) and probably would have written basically the same post here either way. If completely disinterested, I might not be able to tell you that the cookies they served at the last Advisory Board meeting were stale. Just kidding.

One young startup called HipGeo thinks it can do it. Founded and advised by a very strong team, including some early Yahoo people, HipGeo has described itself as "Mint.com for your location" (cool!) and is in fundraising mode now. No launch date has been disclosed yet, but the information available online so far about the company indicates that this is one you'll want to keep an eye on.

• build personal location diaries, including an automatic daily email summary of all the places they went and how long they spent there


• share trips, media and place reviews


• see where their friends are


• send and receive notes left at locations, for particular friends


• get discount alerts targeted to them based on their location, location history and psychographic profile

It sounds a little like Google Latitude, a little like another small startup called Geoloqi (our review) and a little like Facebook Places. In the HipGeo fundraising presentation that the company posted to DocStoc this week, there's no mention of geocoded datasets based on interests other than shopping nor is there any indication that this location service is finally going to be the one to make my location dream come true: tell me the history of the place I'm at. (I swear I'll pay a monthly subscription fee to have one fast button on my phone that will deliver news and historical information about the adress I'm at. Am I really so rare in that? Sadly, I probably am.)

Update: It turns out my cynicism is incorrect. HipGeo co-founder Rich Rygg says that the service will in fact deliver some place history!

"We've already pulled together city information for a New City Alert ('You've entered a new city, would you like to learn about it?') and will deliver the Wikipedia listing and more," he says. "We envision allowing people to sign up for Friend Alerts, Information Alerts, and Offer Alerts, plus the easy ability to share with your friends and family via existing social networks. Our plans for a place include both the HipGeo information and stats, anything available for the place on Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter, Youtube, or elsewhere. Those are the easy. It is very interesting to think about the history thread of a place, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the country, the geology....all starting with the geocoded location."

Yes sir, it does!

Given the team behind HipGeo, it's sure to be interesting. It includes former Yahoo execs Scott Daniel, Jeff Kunzelman and Rich Rygg. Advisors include very early Yahoo engineer and former Chief Technology Evangelist Ash Patel, CitySearch co-founder and CEO Charles Conn and eHarmony Chief Scientist and former Kaiser Permanente Research Director Galen Buckwalter, Ph.D.

Let's see what you've got, guys. The future of location based social networking is yours to innovate or execute your way to the top of.

Why is Google working on mobile location tracking and sharing? It's all about search and relevance. "Our idea is to organize the world's information and part of that is location," Latitude's Ken Norton told us. "Location is a vector against which all factors and metrics will be considered."

Latitude users to date have shared their literal location on a map with a select group of family and friends. Just because friends knew where on a map you were, though, doesn't mean they knew what "place" you were at. (Coffee shop or hospital emergency room?)

All latitude users will now be able to check-in with their phones to specific Google Places locations. When Latitude for the iPhone launched in December, I called it a big disappointment. These new developments are an improvement for sure.

Will Latitude allow users to publish check-ins out to other services like Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook? "We are currently looking at ways to publish to other services," Google's Norton says. "It's an incremental feature to adress the needs of Latitude users." The ability to read check-ins from other services, like Gowalla now allows, seems even further out in the future. Despite what they say about interoperability, most of these location services would still like to be the only game in town.

Two new methods that other location services don't offer yet: Android Latitude users can now opt-in to receive a push notification when they have stopped moving for a period of time at a place that Google recognizes. "We see you're hanging out at Hot Pot City on 2nd avenue," the notification might say. "Would you like to check in there?" Hallelujah!

The next method beyond clicking to check-in as is standard across location apps is a new "geofencing" method. Latitude users on Android can designate certain places they visit frequently and be checked-in there automatically whenever their phone detects that they've returned to that spot.

Both of these are very smart features that will greatly reduce the overhead on checking in and thus greatly increase the frequency with which people declare their location to the web. That's great news.

Norton says that his team is working hard to get the iPhone app for Latitude caught up with Android. I hope these automated check-ins will come to the iPhone app soon. Eventually all location services will likely offer features exactly like these.

Geo-organized Web Content?

Will Google make my dreams come true and help surface news and web content relevant to the Places I visit, automatically? Norton said that Latitude and Google Places would do some of that, but said that Google Goggles was more focused on that kind of search.

I check-in at the park down the street, and there's a beautiful PDF walking tour of the trees in that park available online, but it's on page 3 of Google search results. It ought to be shown to me much more accessibly.

"Rather than building what users ask for, " Norton says, "ask what the problems are that you could solve. With Latitude, I want my spouse to know where I am. I don't think people would have known to ask for that."

That makes sense, but the mark of truly great innovation is creating things that people don't even know they want yet. I'm worried that Latitude, for all its innovation, is going to remain mundane in the long-term. Maybe even get into mobile coupons. Boring!

Give me something I don't even know I want yet, Google. But first, give me automatic check-ins on iPhone and read/write interoperability with diverse location services. Those sound great.

Location technology is incredibly hot right now, innovation is happening fast and furious, the sky's the limit, but the Latitude app is a clumsy and severely limited piece of software that's only likely to appeal to unsophisticated customers who don't know any better. (Update: A commenter rightly told me this is an arrogant and inappropriate choice of words. I apologize.) It represents the latest missed opportunity by Google and just more fuel for the fire for critics who assert that it "doesn't get social technology."

Unfortunately, Latitude isn't very good. It's incredibly simple, something that could be an asset after more than two years of development if what it did offer worked well. It was made available as an HTML5 mobile web app in 2009, and it wasn't very good then either.

Sarah Perez discussed the persistent location sharing and privacy here last week, when the native app was first spotted unannounced.

Little things are bothersome, too: when you deny a request to follow you, for example, the interface says "sending friend request!" That's a little disconcerting. If you want to see good friend management in location sharing apps, check out how Gowalla does it. That's pretty good. Better yet, see how Twitter does it.

Second, Latitude says you have granular controls over location sharing, but that's not really true. By default, you show approved friends your exact location. You can go into settings and place yourself someplace else manually, but Latitude says you can show only city-level location. It's not easy to see how you do that, but if you click through several clicks on a particular contact, you can find a setting that limits that contact to being able to see what city you're in. You ought to be able to share neighborhood level location, as well.

You can't view historical locations and you can't leave a comment on your location. Latitude is so simple and so exclusively set up for small-group sharing that it feels overly constrained and uninteresting.

Is he moving? How long has he been where he's at right now? What's nearby his current location? What's going on? I have no idea.

Why on earth is Latitude not integrated with Google Places? Why not leverage Wikipedia and Google MyMaps like Google Earth does, so I can learn something about the place I'm at. Maybe it will be some day.

In the mean time, I'm not going to use Latitude, I'm going to keep using what I do today for location. I'll use Glympse when I want to share my location with a select group of people, I'll use Foursquare when I want to post the places I'm at and tips about those places and I'll use Gowalla when I want to see where all my friends across Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla are at.

Is that too complicated for most people? Probably not - but even if it were, the inflexible and extreme simplicity of Latitude today is no answer to that.

Google knows that, when you're on the go, you're searches often have to do with where you are and what you're doing. If you're looking for a steak house, you don't simply want to know the closest steak house, you want to know what reviewers on Yelp or Zagat thought of the place. You also want to know some simple information like whether or not it's open, the neighborhood it's in and that sort of thing.

In today's update, Google Maps for Android has updated its design for Place pages and begun offering "Reviews from around the Web" and reviews from other Google users. As for search results, you can now filter your search results not only by distance and rating, but by business hours, neighborhood and related searches. And the addition of real-time Google Latitude means that if you and your friends are using Latitude, you can find each other that much easier. Never mind the blue car down the street, you're the blue dot on the screen.

The newest version of Google Maps is available for download in the Android Marketplace and works with Android 1.6 and higher. Google Latitude requires Android 2.2+.

And with that in mind, Google has updated Google Latitude so that you can both see where your friends are as well as share your own location.

The new site also gives access to some of the app's other features, so you can see your personal location history for example, as well as adjust your location alerts for when friends are nearby.

While these are all improvements to the site, it's hard to say how much Google Latitude will be used, as the emphasis of location-based check-ins are on mobile phones, not to mention via services like Facebook, Foursquare, and Gowalla.

Hans Scharler's thermostat keeps dibs on his location, the outside temperature and the temperature inside the house, and decides when to kick on the air conditioning or heat.

We've written about ioBridge (see Top 10 Internet of Things Products of 2009) and ioBridge implementation before (see Automate Your Home Using ioBridge and Twitter).

Scharler wrote the project in Perl, which he said is "perfect for parsing lots of data, pushing data into databases, and connecting services together." He can also manually control the thermostat using an ioBridge Application Programming Interface, or API, that sends commands to the thermostat controller.

Now that the system is functional, Scharler said he's had "a flood of ideas" for location-aware apps mashed with Internet-connected objects. Your house could come alive when you pull into the driveway - thermostat clicks on, garage door opens, coffee starts brewing, your burglar alarm deactivates.

What applications do you see coming out of location awareness and networked things? Do you think these applications are neat, or is Scharler's project a Rube Goldberg machine, performing a simple task with an impressive but overly-complicated mechanism?

Much has been written already today about Apple's insistence that Latitude be accessed through the browser, instead of as a downloaded app. That's hardly the only thing wrong with it. So far, it's just plain terrible. Here's why.

• No status messages

There's no way to post any additional information to Latitude along with your location. It's just your location, nothing more. That means no context. You can see where your friends are but there's no way to know what they are doing!

Brightkite, on the other hand, lets you post text messages or photos with your location updates. A stream of location updates from your friends or other people becomes meaningful, readable.

• There are no places in Latitude

In Brightkite, people check in from places - named public businesses or other locations like stores, parks, etc. With just a few clicks Brightkite can guess what place you're at, and not just places other Brightkite users have identified. You can also look at the history of check-ins and comments from other users at that location.

In Latitude every place is just another dumb spot on a map, with no history or context.

• No granular control over location exposure

In Latitude you're either public or private, down to the half-block or zoomed out to say what city you're in. Luckily the service got my house's location wrong by 5 blocks, but other users say it's quite precise. Why can't I expose my location with more granular control? Why can't I show where I am with a half mile, for example?

You can change the crude settings on a friend-by-friend basis ("only show this person what city I am in") but it's a far cry from the much more privacy-conscious set up at Brightkite. When you launch the app you're greeted with a very reassuring tutorial on how to control your visibility. There's all kinds of options to change how close your location listing will be to where you're detected as being by your phone.

One nice thing about Latitude is that you can manually drag a map marker to a location to register as being there. I haven't figured out how to do that on Brightkite yet.

• Refreshing my location is not intuitive

Every time you visit the Latitude web page on the iPhone, your location is updated. If you'd like to have more control over the experience, or manually refresh it, you have to click through a few screens and then (I think) click on an unmarked blue button.

On Brightkite, "checking in" is a very conscious act.

• No web interface or much of anything, it's locked up in a widget

There is no way page for Latitude! When you visit the service's home page you are prompted to install an iGoogle widget for Latitude. That's where you do some basic account and friend management, but there's no RSS feeds, no direct access to the page, it's like one of those dime store games where you tilt a box covered in plastic around to navigate some object through a maze. You can't touch the object, you can't touch the maze, it's an odd way to participate in a social network.

Just for the sake of comparison, the Brightkite web page is remarkably well designed and full featured. There are RSS and KML (map data) feeds for every user. That means you can do interesting things with the information, offsite.

• You can't sort contacts by proximity

The only way to view your friends on Latitude is in the order they have checked-in in, the most recently updated first. Why would you not be allowed to see who is closest to you?

On Brightkite I didn't even need to add any friends for the service to be interesting - I can view people who are within the same region, city, area or block as me and have updated their location publicly.

Brightkite is small, but it's so much better than Latitude that it's remarkable. There are other options out there as well, from Shizzow for local networking to Tripit and Dopplr for travelers.

If any of those startups came out with an offering as boring as Latitude they wouldn't be taken seriously at all. It's clearly Google's size, access to our address books, ability to push users to a new service through other established services and the unspoken concern about Google knowing where we are that combine to make Latitude interesting. There's also a chance that Latitude could become something fabulous, as many other Google products have. There are many other Google products that have not, though, as well. So far Latitude, even for the iPhone, isn't worth much time and isn't a good indicator of the potential of the location based social networking genre.

SHARED TRAVEL PLANNING: Both Tripit and Dopplr are fantastic tools for keeping track of itineraries and sharing travel plans with friends. Meanwhile Gliider is a great tool for saving large blocks of trip-related text and syncing them to offline folders.

gliider from jared richardson on Vimeo.

DIRECTIONS: TeleNav provides GPS services for a number of mobile devices including the iPhone. The tool offers voice driving directions, spoken address recognition, rerouting for accidents and traffic jams, and locates wireless hotspots, the lowest gas prices, parking lots and ATMs. TomTom for iPhone is also expected to be a great tool as the docking station doubles as a charger.

FOOD: Many of us are familiar finding food with the Yelp and Urbanspoon iPhone apps; however, if you want an authentic road trip experience you might want to consult Roadfood. This site lays claim to the "most memorable local eateries along the highways and back roads of America." We get heart palpitations just looking at the heaping plates of pulled pork, burgers and ribs. Meanwhile, if you're looking to picnic with something more healthy and sustainable, Local Harvest's farmer's market finder coupled with the Locavore iPhone app offer users the chance to find local in-season produce. Locallectual offers a similar tool with their iLocavore app.

VIDEOS & PHOTOS: One way to get images up quickly is to stream them directly from your camera. Eye-Fi uses a wireless connection to upload photos and videos directly to your Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Picassa accounts. If you want to live stream sans touch ups or editing, Eye-Fi is an extremely useful cordless solution. Other mobile streaming video and image options include Qik, Flixwagon, Stickam, Justin.tv and Kyte Producer.

GEO-TAGGING: AroundShare is a mobile application that allows users to publish photos to Google Maps. Meanwhile, Flickr's users can also organize their videos and photos on a map via the site's geo-tagging features. As for geo-based discovery, Flickr mobile utilizes the locational features of the Android and iPhone and allows members to explore public photos from nearby sites.

TRACKING:Google Latitude lets users share their location on a map in real time from their phones or computers. Maps can be embedded in public websites and road trippers appear as moving dots on the map. Imagine your best friend surprising you with Thai food just as you pull up to your hotel. Services like Brightkite and Loopt also broadcast your location; however, these services are based on push notifications rather than real time tracking.

TELLING THE STORY: The Whuffaoke group is using Dipity to aggregate their media. The service allows users to upload their Tweets, blog posts and photo sets to a map, time line and flip book interface. The nice thing about this tool is that it can either be embedded (as seen here) or shared via Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Reddit or Digg. Other tools to aggregate road trip-related media include JS-Kit's Echo, Disqus or an embedded hashtag feed.

For the Google public badge, users can choose if they want the widget to show their location at a city-level only, or if they want to allow it to show their location more precisely. Given the public nature of the badge, this will surely raise some security concerns, especially when users choose to update their Latitude data automatically.

The Google Talk widget only uses the name of the city the user is currently staying in to update their status.

Google stresses that it takes its users privacy very seriously, but there can be no doubt that privacy concerns are currently limiting the mainstream appeal of many of these applications.

Google is clearly taking a very serious look at location aware services and according to today's blog post, the company plans to introduce more applications that can make use of one's Latitude data in the near future. Google is also soliciting new ideas from its users here.

More Noise to Signal

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Web Trends

How a Facebook "Sentiment Engine" Could Be Huge

Rumors of a Facebook "sentiment engine" analyzing aggregate user data, or a new form of the company's Engagement Ads that offer rapid polling to advertisers, have been flying around the web since the start of this week's World Economic Forum in Switzerland. The reality behind these rumors seems to be much less exciting (or creepy, depending on your perspective) than many people claimed - but we'd like to entertain some thoughts on just what Facebook could do with such a system. Remember when Google published the most popular searches being performed during the Presidential debates? That represented a sea change in real-time awareness of what people care about. A Facebook "sentiment engine" has that same kind of potential, and we'd love to see some of this data be put to use in service of such innovation.

Fake Social Network Profiles: a New Form of Identity Theft in 2009

Forget credit cards and social security numbers, a new lot of identity thieves will soon come after your web profiles, or says security firm Aladdin in their Annual Threat Report. According to the firm, if you don't own and control your online persona, it's relatively easy for a criminal to aggregate the known public information about you in order to create a fake one.

Government 2.0: The Rise of the Goverati

Everyone knows how well Barack Obama's presidential campaign made use of new media to raise money and market the candidate. We also know how big a role social technology played during inauguration week, from handheld flip HD footage appearing on network TV to people reporting on Twitter about what they liked and disliked. After President Obama took office, spirited debates proliferated in the blogosphere about whether or not whitehouse.gov is Web 2.0-enabled and what the role of President Obama's CTO might be. But one striking trend has largely flown under the national radar: the rise of the goverati.

RWW Live: Recommendation Engines

ReadWriteWeb has been running a special series on recommendation engines and this episode of RWW Live is part of that. The show featured 3 very knowledgeable guests: Jesús Pindado, Strands Vice President, Business Solutions; Yosi Glick, Jinni CEO & Co-Founder; and David Selinger, richrelevance CEO & Co-Founder, who previously led the R&D arm of Amazon's Data Mining and Personalization team. Check out the recording below:

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A Word from Our Sponsors

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Jobwire

Dan Zarrella Hired By HubSpot

New media marketing hacker Dan Zarrella has joined Boston's fast ascending firm HubSpot, the company told us this week. Zarrella calls himself "The Social Media and Viral Marketing Scientist" and is one of the few people on the web with the credentials to back up such a bold claim.

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Web Products

Google Latitude: Ready to Tell Your Friends (and Google) Where You Are?

Where you are is as important as what you're looking for. That's why more and more services are looking to location as a filter for providing relevant information when and where we need it. So it only makes sense that Google - a company known for its ability to deliver relevant information - get into the location-aware app game. This week, they jumped in with both feet by releasing Google Latitude, a way to keep track of your friends' current whereabouts - and let Google have a view into your nomadic or sedentary habits.

Did Google Just Kill All the Other Mobile Social Networks?

Google Latitude will have major ramifications to the current mobile social networking market, which was just beginning to get off the ground. The question we must ask now is this: did Google just validate mobile social networking ...or did they just kill all the competition?

Baynote: Does Focusing on Real-Time Behavior Trump Amazon's Technology?

Baynote is one of a number of recommendation technology providers which licenses its product to commercial companies. As we'll see in this article, Baynote places particular emphasis on real-time user behaviors - which Baynote claims goes beyond Amazon's "first generation" approach to recommendations. One thing that we've discovered so far in our series on recommendation engines is that every company in this market - including those which create their own platform, like Amazon and Netflix - have differing approaches and ideas on what makes a good recommendation engine. We spoke to Baynote founder and CEO Jack Jia, to find out why he believes their approach trumps Amazon.

Soon, Majority of Web Users Will No Longer Use IE

It might take a few more years, or it might happen suddenly, but trends appear to indicate that the time when Internet Explorer is used by the majority of people on the web will soon come to an end. New numbers from analytics firm Net Applications put IE at a mere 67.5%, having dropped more than 7% last year. The bulk of that loss is coming from users of IE 6, an 8 year old browser that many users now appear to be replacing with Firefox, Safari or Chrome, instead of updated versions of IE.

Google Earth Now Maps the Ocean Floor and Mars in 3D

This week Google released a major new update to Google Earth that now includes the rumored maps of the ocean floor. Google unveiled this update at an event at the California Academy of Sciences. After installing the latest version of Google Earth, you will be able to explore the ocean floor in the same way you browse the Earth's surface. Besides mapping the oceans, however, Google has also added three more interesting new features to Google Earth: easier access to historical imagery, the ability to record and narrate fly-through tours with the new 'touring' feature, and a 3D map of Mars.

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Enterprise

How Businesses Can Use P2P

Almost every description of P2P in the context of business infrastructure starts something like this: "P2P is notorious for..." This comes from many years of people associating P2P with illegal downloading, to the point that the terms are now almost synonymous. Such an association is inherently unfair, however, because no one equates TCP/IP and crime, despite the fact that TCP/IP is the protocol of choice for many cyber-criminals. Rather than resorting to out-dated and inaccurate definitions, let's start from scratch and consider the following: what is P2P, really? What is it good for? How can we use it to save and earn money?

Email us if you're interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb's Enterprise Channel.

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That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

Knowing where people are is great. Being able to get ahold of them is even better. That's why Latitude also lets you interact with them by providing access to SMS and IM or allowing you to call them.

It's All About the Data

While many of us have grown used to providing details on our travels by updating location-aware apps like Brightkite or checking in with sites like Dopplr, those journeys have always been loosely affiliated with the rest of our habits - through a lifestream, at best. Today, with Google gathering this information, it changes the picture entirely.

For millions of users, Google already knows how they search, what they click, what they buy, who they know, how they communicate, and where they go on the Web. Location enables them to add another critical data point - where they are when they're performing any of those actions. So if you think Google has too much information about you already, you've got another think coming.

Long story short, Latitude adds a whole new level of complexity to Google's understanding of you and your habits. And while we'll no doubt derive some very interesting benefits from sharing that information, we should hold no illusions about the value of that data to Google and its efforts to run a profitable business.

But, in Google's defense, they've also worked to ensure you have a way to opt out of the service and maintain complete control over your privacy. Katherine Boehret of The Wall Street Journal, who has had the opportunity to test drive Latitude for the past week, also gives a nod to those opt-out features:

"Usability issues aside, location-based services like Latitude can be just plain creepy, especially when a Big Brother like Google is tracking your whereabouts. So Google incorporated easy-to-change privacy settings so that locations can be automatically detected, manually entered or completely hidden from other people. Or people can sign out of Latitude altogether."

Do No Evil, Please

It was only a matter of time before Google entered this market, and no doubt millions of people will soon be flooding the service with their up-to-the-minute location details. With the combination of Google Maps, Google Latitude, Google Friend Connect, and Android, it's not very difficult to begin daydreaming about the potential for this service.

But it's also a leap of faith as a user, entrusting Google with yet another piece of data that helps them figure out the puzzle of understanding you - and how and where you're likely to perform actions that put money in Google's pocket.

It will be interesting to see where Google goes with this one - and interesting to see where you're going, now that we can look over your shoulder.

Update: See our follow-up analysis Did Google Just Kill All the Other Mobile Social Networks?