Although the company is not specifically marketing Mix as a dating application, it's clearly designed for mobile singles because - let's face it - who else would want to browse the photos and profiles of nearby folks and strike up IM-based conversations with those who look interesting? If that's not about dating, then it's just borderline creepy.

While Loopt Mix is not the first iPhone-based dating application - others like DatingDNA and Skout have beaten them to the punch - the company may have a leg up on their competition already, thanks to brand recognition alone. That's because Loopt was featured in one of the many iPhone TV commercials last year as a great way to stay in touch with friends. Given widespread exposure like that, Loopt is already well known beyond the early adopter set.

Loopt Mix Features

Like its competitors, Loopt Mix lets you tap into the iPhone's location-based features to see which other Loopt Mix members are nearby. You can browse their profiles, view and post photos and status messages, and start chat sessions - all of which is par for the course with mobile dating apps these days. In fact, there's nothing all that revolutionary about Mix's feature set, except perhaps for its ability to send you real-time push notifications - something that a few other social networking apps, Facebook included, have yet to adopt.

In Loopt Mix, the push notifications work with the app's built-in chat functionality, so you're notified when and if someone responds to you, without you having to sit there looking uncool while constantly reloading the page or staring at a blank chat window.

It's also worth mentioning that you don't have to be out on the town to take advantage of Loopt Mix. Since it simply locates people near you, you could use this anywhere - even in your own home - to find and connect to other interesting people. However, should you ever want to go offline, you and the other person would have to make arrangements to meet somewhere... just as you would on a "real" dating website like Match.com or eHarmony. The only difference with Loopt Mix is that, unlike traditional dating sites, the app is completely free. That, too, could help Mix grow - especially in this tough economy, where finding love for a fee is a luxury many can no longer afford.

This is an important subject for those companies looking to enter into the geo-locational space. Groups that encrypt their data are taking pains to reduce the threat of identity theft, illegal surveillance or for data to be subpoenaed by a court. These companies will be rewarded with customer loyalty when the unfortunate time comes for one or all three of the above scenarios.

Those critical of encryption might suggest that law-abiding citizens have nothing to hide, but that simply isn't true. What if you're in alcoholics anonymous? Or you've simply spent the night at a person's house? And honestly, do you really want your running club to see how often you eat at Arby's? Encryption allows us to ping our friends while maintaining an air of mystique, and at the end of the day, the companies that care about their customers, keep them.

Garage sales are no longer just for blue-haired grandmothers with teacup fetishes. While eBay and Etsy are great for selling rare or specialty items, setting up an auction or store for your mismatched cutlery might not get you the results you need. One blessing in this down economy is that we're learning to reclaim and recycle in a way that our grandmothers have been doing for years. Whether you like haggling over weird items on a Sunday or you'd simply like to list your own sale, here are some great resources.

2. GSALR: This site improves where Craigslist leaves off. While it does not offer images from sales, it does offer a map of the region, an RSS feed on new listings and a trip planner for multi-sale routes. Garage Sale Nation offers a similar tool, and the most results seem to appear in Massachusetts, Virginia, New York and Michigan.

Yard Sale Search: This site is extremely bare bones, but if you're just looking for a site to list all of the multi-family sales in your area, the results are quick and plentiful.

3. ZipGarage: ZipGarage is a site where garage sale hunters type in their postal code and receive results on sales in their area. RWW first wrote about ZipGarage in 2007. While this site is perhaps one of the best designed garage sale sites, it still lacks the users. If you're having a sale, you might still want to embed the widget to give directions to your users.

4. Upcoming and Facebook Events: Your friends DO want to buy your junk, or at the very least they want to spend Sunday drinking beer on your lawn. A great way to kick start a yard sale is to reach out to your online networks, prepare some sandwiches and treat the event like a lawn party. Upcoming and Facebook events offer great ways to announce localized events and the best part is that your friends are likely to get calendar reminders for your sale.

5. Twitter, Loopt: These location-based services are great for that last minute sale push or reminder. While nearby followers might not have planned to buy anything, if they're in the area, they just might stop by for an impulse purchase.

6.The Local Paper and Craigslist: We're sure you already know about these options, but if you're having a sale, it would be silly not to list here. With Craigslist, users can narrow their search by neighborhood and keyword, and choose to specify only those results that contain images.

*Final Tips for Sellers: After you've tweeted, listed and advertised your yard sale, remember that old school rules still apply. Some of the must-haves of a garage sales include ample signage, properly labeled tables, extra boxes and bags, a measuring tape for furniture and about $100 in small bills and quarters for change.

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.

With the rise of smartphone-based computing, applications like Brightkite, Loopt, and others were slowly growing their user base, letting friends share posts, photos, and other information with each other as they moved from place to place out in the real world. Accessed via mobile applications or SMS, these sorts of networks provided the framework for connecting people to the places they visit.

However, it was too soon to determine whether mobile social networking was a space that would ever really take off. As studies showed, the social networks that most people accessed on the go were not specialized "mobile" networks, but the usual ones - Facebook and MySpace. Having to recreate a friend graph on new mobile social networks was not something everyone was up for...at least it hadn't been not so far.

Without any easy way to import MySpace and Facebook friends to these newer mobile networks (like via Facebook Connect for example), our mobile social networks were filled only with an odd mix of friends: some early adopters and maybe a handful of tech-obsessed locals. But that being said, the networks still had potential assuming they could have ever gotten over the initial hump to gather critical mass. They were offering something unique, and that boded well for them. Being able to tune into the world around you and see who was there, who had been there, and what was going on was a type of augmented reality that was never possible before the advent of modern mobile computing.

Google's Potential to Dominate

Now that Google has come onto the scene, friend graphs already intact, one has to wonder about the impact this will have on these smaller networks. How will they survive? Google is already a mainstream service and Latitude was just covered by the Wall Street Journal. Needless to say, any mainstream users out there intrigued by mobile social networking will now just go try Google's service.

Yet where the smaller networks had the cozy feel of you and handful of friends, any service maintained by a behemoth such as Google immediately has a "Big Brother" feel to it. No matter how many opt-out features and privacy controls they offer, some people just won't be able to shake that feeling that Google is just a little too omnipresent in our lives. But will "fear of Google" alone be enough to keep people from leaving the small mobile networks in favor of the larger one?

According to Martin May, Brightkite founder, though, Google didn't even come close to killing his service. "With Brightkite," he says, "we are primarily focused making meaningful connections with people you didn't necessarily know yet, around places. Latitude seems focused on showing you where your existing friends are at. Functionality-wise, Latitude does very little beyond sharing a latitude, longitude and accuracy with friends at the moment." But even May admits that may change down the road.

Wait...Our Real Friends Aren't on Google

What's strange about the mobile social networking market, though, are the missing players. The major missing players. Where is Facebook? Where is MySpace? Why is it that the biggest social networks on the planet have decidedly shunned any attempt to add proximity and mapping to their mobile services?

If anything our real friends are here, not on Google, whose friend network includes random people from our Gmail accounts, interesting folks from our RSS readers, and the occasional visitors to our blogs (thanks to the Google Friend Connect widget). Those may be people who we work with, people who wanted to share feeds with us, or fellow bloggers, but they aren't necessarily our real-life friends. And since they're not, why on earth would we want to share our locations with them?

The ability to connect to all our real-life, real-world friends and family - friends that include mainstream web users, mom, dad, and the kids - is something that just isn't here yet. No matter which mobile social network you end up using, including Google's, you're only going to see a slice of your actual social network. A true mobile social network would integrate friends from all the major social networks we participate in, plus our bevy of work colleagues from the social network hidden in our email, and, for all those non-participants out there, it would let us add them via their mobile phone number. But that really would be creepy, so we sort of hope it never happens.

Still Limited

While we have little doubt that mobile social networking will become a big market in the future, today's reality is still rather bleak. Because of the limitations in the current hardware and software implementations, a lot of the location-based social networks like Loopt, WhosHere, Pelago's Whrrl, and others feel limited and at times rather gimmicky.

Also, most of these networks simply suffer from the fact that they don't have many users and that the chances of finding any of your friends on them are relatively low for now.

What About the Established Networks?

In the near future, mobile social networking is only really going to grow once the big social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, or MyYearBook start releasing location-aware applications for mobile devices.

Overall, we don't put too much stock into the ABI report. Thanks to highly targeted location-based advertising, there is a good chance that a mobile social network that manages to attract enough users (or any of the already establish social networks that releases a location aware application) will be able to be financially successful. For right now, however, with a market that is barely establish, trying to put a number on the potential success of these networks is almost silly.

In addition, Loopt aggregates local content to provide a map view of great places and star ratings. As Loopt adds more content partners besides Yelp, the various review and events sites will be mashed up for users. The iPhone map interface comes in handy here, as scrolling around and zooming in with two fingers is substantially faster and more intuitive than on other platforms. This screenshot shows the feature in action, where users can find quick overviews of locations nearby and click in to read more Yelp reviews about specific places.

Despite how slick the iPhone interface is, Loopt does not yet allow users to write reviews on Yelp from inside the application. Finding this feature lacking, Sam pointed out that users can still make their voices heard through Loopt updates, but this seemed more a concession than an optimal solution. It doesn't make a lot of sense to write reviews as, say, Twitter messages, when the reviews users find on Loopt come from Yelp. Loopt potentially could have brought together both the content from Yelp and the means to write live reviews on the site. Also, Yelp information will only be available to Loopt users on the iPhone. This release falls short of the full range of possibilities of pushing and pulling content from review sites, but presumably this will be addressed in future releases.

Beyond the iPhone: the Road Ahead

This release points to a few interesting possibilities location-based services like Loopt could offer with content partners. It's easy to imagine a platform of reviews, ratings, and preferences indexed by location. As the platform evolves, it could be possible to find not just content about events and places but content from users actually at those areas as events unfold. Finding out about nearby events, even when not advertised, may only be a matter of searching for interesting things in the chatter of a location aware universe.

There are also some novel monetization opportunities. Loopt recently partnered with CBS to deliver location aware ads. Stores and restaurants could, in theory, use the same platform as users do to publish coupons and event notices, creating buzz to attract nearby customers. Location aware advertising in conjunction with location aware user content could become a live directory of what's happening where. The company could take this even further by intelligently suggesting new places and events to users, leveraging their growing local content store and personalization data.

Many others also share that vision. Google seems to have abandoned their Dodgeball acquisition, but they could reinvest in this space and leverage the hundreds of millions of Google accounts in conjunction with the technology that Dodgeball provided. Kleiner Perkins-funded Pelago are also releasing their competing product, Whrrl, onto the iPhone; Boston-based ULocate does more or less the same thing as Loopt and also has deals with AT&T. Even Sense Networks which formerly focused more on aggregating macro-scale GPS information is getting in on the action with heatmaps showing hot nightlife locales.

As the mobile space moves toward platforms like the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile, we should expect the space to start seriously heating up. Much of the effort Loopt spent in their earlier years forging phone pre-installation deals with carriers will become less strategic as consumers adopt platforms. Loopt is banking heavily on the network effect they've built up from past deals with Boost, Sprint, and Verizon and developing new, useful features that will attract enough users to pass the tipping point.

Regardless, this is a space that will eventually be developed, be it by Loopt or by someone else. For now, their iPhone release has some interesting features, but only hints at some of the possibilities the service could offer. As the market matures, the vision of connecting users to places and events via both content and location will no doubt play a key role in the emerging mobile services market. Whether Loopt will take advantage of their platform and their current head start or be swallowed by competitors - only time will tell.

Here's a video from our earlier post:

This has been a guest post by Nate Janewit. You can find him online at FriendFeed and Twitter.

According to FriendFeed's Bret Taylor, the problem was caused by an malfunctioning API client. At the time, he didn't know whether the problem was accidental or intentional, so they disabled the API client and researched the IP address to determine where these messages were coming from. They then got in touch with the developer to let him know what was going on.

As it turned out, the service at fault was Gridjit, a social portal service still in alpha that uses both Twitter's and FriendFeed's APIs to allow you to view and interact with both services from Gridjit's web site.

As soon as FriendFeed got in touch with Gridjit, Gridjit's founder, Ray Grieselhuber, disabled the service's ability to post statuses, comments, and likes from within Gridjit and shut off access to the account management screens. After a day's worth of research, the problem was discovered - it wasn't a security issue, just a bug in the code. The issues is being addressed now and the affected users who had comments posted under their name were contacted via an email that read:

I'm sending this to let you know about a bug in Gridjit's code that caused a comment to be posted to FriendFeed in your name.

I spent the day reviewing the system and performing security audits to ensure that that this was not a security violation - it was not.

Rather, it was a bug in the system that caused the extra comments to be posted based on some obscure query patterns. I'm taking steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

If you would like to see the comments and delete them, the FriendFeed links can be found here:

http://friendfeed.com/e/6def167a-f3d2-4711-aebd-6f8171919178/http-www-geeky-gadgets-com/

http://friendfeed.com/e/8be20617-8d57-478c-a367-98da5d02a8a0/Not-a-complete-list-of-top-diggers/

I sincerely apologize for this. The quality of your experience with Gridjit is very important to me.

Additional details and updates will be posted on the Gridjit blog (http://blog.gridjit.com).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Ray Grieselhuber

Write APIs - A Cause For Concern?

While in this particular case, the issue was relatively minor and more of a strange occurrence than anything, it was only through FriendFeed's quick action that the entire service was not affected by this programming bug. Of course, it was also helpful that Gridjit is still in private alpha testing at the moment, so there aren't a lot of users currently using their service.

But what if this bug had come from another service that was heavily used? And what if it had been a web app that's far more mission-critical than FriendFeed?

The problem with providing an open API (that is, a write API) is that all it takes is one programmer to have a big impact on a service. Like in the case of Gridjit, it may be an accidental bug in their code, but it could have just as easily been someone with a more malicious intent.

So instead, via the BONDI initiative, OMTP will define what interfaces developers need to access when writing apps that tap into more sensitive functions on the mobile device. BONDI will expose those handset features to the developers while also protecting the users from any fraudulent or malicious activity.

In addition, the web services that result from the BONDI initiative will incorporate the various open and proprietary work currently in progress in this area of mobile development so as not to cause more fragmentation.

As today's mobile phones become more like mini-computers, the need for standards and security is paramount. The members of OMTP agree. Having standards will "encourage more developers to create unique, exciting applications for mobile web 2.0," says Arnd Gallmann SVP Terminal Technology at T-Mobile.

We couldn't agree more and are now eagerly awaiting the plethora of services that are sure to result from this move.

But email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what's happening and assess if email is in danger.

Twitter was invented because there was a gap in public broadcast communication. Doing Twitter over email would be clunky, if not impossible. The ability to post your personal statuses, decoupled from the ability to subscribe to people you're interested in, put Twitter on the map. People are sending direct messages via Twitter instead of sending an email.

Email is perceived as work, while Twitter is still thought of as fun. Twitter messages are short, use is casual, and Twitter is a cute piece of technology loved by the earlier adopter crowd. People send Tweets complaining their Inbox is full.

The Twitter experience is lighter because of the user interface. With Twitter, we're presented with a scrollable list of messages.

With email we need to select the message and drill into it. Traditionally email clients show only the subject line, so even if the message is short, the user needs to click. And all these clicks add up.

The Outlook Problem

Email is a workhorse. Microsoft realised that business people want one tool to do it all, so email was enhanced with calendar, to do lists and other features.

The problem: all this was slammed on top of email, which became the entry point into a black hole known as My Inbox. Short and long messages, business and personal emails, tasks, events - all stacked on top of each other.

Outlook is a powerful piece of software that lets you organise and sort, but you have to drive it. For many, email is hard work and a mess that needs to be dealt with.

Simpler email clients, like Gmail, focus on how to be a better email client instead of being a hammer for all problems. An innovation like aggregating conversations has huge impact on productivity.

In the years Microsoft was adding more buttons to the toolbar, they should have invested more on the core innovation around email and productivity. Wiring in NLP and semantics to extract things like People, Events and Places would be a good start. Designing emails around use cases like "this is a meeting, this is a project, this is a friend" would go a long way towards helping avoid the Inbox clutter.

Breaking Down Email

Since email was the first killer app for the web, it's used for everything. We're now observing a fragmentation cycle where we're discovering better ways of passing around information and getting things done.

Email is fundamentally great at substantial person-to-person communication. The following diagram illustrates why email is facing competition. It cannot effectively support broadcast (except for spam) and it's still poor at helping with tasks and projects.

Tools like Basecamp and Highrise from 37Signals are showing there's a way to better project management and CRM while leveraging information in emails. If the Twitter service stabilises it's likely to win over people permanently because of its simplicity and playfulness.

Social networks incorporate direct messaging and chats, making it easy for people to talk directly, bypassing email. These communications are easier than email; they're integrated into the flow and more accessible. To be fair, they're aimed for brief messages.

The increasing speed of our lives and global connectivity reduces the need for lengthy emails. If we're in touch more often, then we reveal less every time we talk. Shorter, more frequent exchanges are replacing the lengthier communication of the past.

Corporate Safe Haven?

Even if consumers shift away from email, it is difficult to see how enterprises could. Microsoft has done a wonderful job winning that market and ensuring companies would not function without an Exchange server. A typical proprietary bloatware, Exchange and Outlook handle it all. It doesn't seem feasible for companies to shift away from email anytime soon.

Likely we will see two trends. Google will continue to champion its solution, which, if successful, will bring much needed simplicity to email.

The second trend is simpler project management tools to reduce the functions needing to be done with email. The challenge is that they need to be seamlessly integrated with the email, ideally leveraging its content and automatically generating tasks, events, contacts, etc.

Conclusion

Email has been the blockbuster and the Internet killer app for the past few decades, but it doesn't have a monopoly. New more contextual ways to communicate are emerging and slicing pieces of the email pie, particularly in the consumer market.

We're likely to see a consumer shift from email towards more compact forms of communication, but in the enterprise the email hold is strong and unlikely to be replaced any time soon.

What do you think about the future of email? How have your communication patterns been evolving? What communication tools do you prefer to email?

Anton Talks About The Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

Not all the users have these features enabled yet, but those of you who do can check by going to upcoming and checking for a red BETA label. The new upcoming system has three ways to sort it and the third option in the list, Most Diggs, is the one you're used to seeing, where all stories are presented in order of decreasing Diggs.

The first new option, Most Matches, looks at your history of Digging, compares it with other community members, and shows the stories in order of number of matches. In the case of the first story, you see the expanded view of the 'Recommendations via' list, and in the case of the second story, you see it in the compact version, not showing the user names and percentages, rather only the total number. For example:

The second new option, Most Recent, shows you the stories recommended by community members compatible with you, in reverse chronological order. You can also see why a story was recommended to you (via user name and percentage of compatibility with that user).

A new section in the sidebar, entitled 'Diggers Like You' shows you Diggers that are most like you in their Digging and submitting habits.

And finally, you can click on a user and compare exactly how much you overlap. In the screenshot you see below you can see the overlap between my profile and thediggboss's profile. In total we had 3864 overlapping Diggs in the past 30 days, which means our compatibility score over all our Digg activity is 38%.

Overall the design is great and there is a decent feature set. As far as what it is designed to do, it seems to function well. At the same time however, whether the engine will help content submitted by a fairly obscure user, remains to be seen. In the beginning, all your compatibilities are going to be with the people that you have been Digging and the people that have been Digging you back, i.e. your friends. It will require widespread use of the feature 'Diggers Like You' to help more obscure submissions travel to a lot of people.

It is also important to note that the recommendation engine will be a boon to advertisers as well (and of course Digg). By sending the most relevant links to the most relevant people, you can also send the most relevant advertisements to the right people (and ensure high-quality clickthroughs). Users get good content and related, hopefully non-intrusive ads, advertisers get the right potential customers, and Digg gets the money.

This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites. You can follow Muhammad on Twitter.

Special thanks to thediggboss for providing the images.

So far, none of the larger search engines have been able to capitalize on the promises of semantic search. Most of the innovations in the space so far have come from small start-ups and even those never made any real inroads in terms of market share when compared to the keyword driven search engines of Google, Ask, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Powerset's technology might just give Microsoft the ability to differentiate its Live Search product from the competition.

Loopt actually launched back in 2006 after receiving funding from YCombinator as well as Series A from NEA and Sequioa. Back then, it was only available to Boost Mobile customers as a Java mobile client. In 2007, Loopt added Sprint Nextel to their list of carriers. However, it was this year when Loopt really started to grow, announcing more deals and a developers program which provides access to Loopt's APIs for building location-aware applications.

Today, Loopt has deals with all major U.S. carriers, including AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Alltel, and Boost Mobile. Although some networks support more phones than others, Loopt has made a smart move by not ignoring the other big smartphone out there - the Blackberry. Loopt now works on Blackberry phones on Sprint, Alltel, T-Mobile, and AT&T.

In addition to Blackberry support, Loopt works with a handful of other popular phones, like Sprint's Razr and Razr2, but the big news of late was the reveal of the new Loopt app for the 3G iPhone which was featured during Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote.

How It Works

Like other location-based mobile social networks, Loopt lets you share your location, status, and photos with everyone on the service or just with your friends. A built-in mapping application shows you where your friends are and what they're doing. To send out updates, you can either use your Loopt friend list or use AIM, thanks to included integration with that instant messaging service.

As you move around, Loopt uses GPS to automatically update your location and status - a feature that some people (usually those in the older generation) find a little disconcerting. For additional privacy, this location updating feature can be set to "manual" mode instead. Of course, you're in control of who gets to "spy" on you - if you don't want to be stalked by unknown strangers, then you simply don't friend them.

A Loopt Map

The Problem With Loopt

Despite all the new Blackberry phones supported, there are still several models that aren't yet able to use Loopt. (My T-Mobile Pearl would be one of them). Of course, there are also tons of "regular" phones that are unsupported, too. Meanwhile, the service has to compete with other mobile social networks, like Brightkite for example, where the only barrier to entry is the ability to use SMS.

For Loopt, some questions remain: can a mobile social network really succeed if only a limited number of phones are supported? Can Loopt succeed if they only focus on smartphones?

Maybe, maybe not...but then again, it could be that Loopt is just betting on the fact that in year or so from now after everyone's contracts run out, we'll all just be using iPhones anyway. Because really, that Loopt app for iPhone is pretty hot:

But what happens when companies or governments start using technologies like these to track us against our will, or without our consent?

Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press reports tonight about definite example of cell phone location privacy intentionally violated without the knowledge of the phone owners. Researchers at Northeastern University won't say where the 100,000 people they tracked live or what companies helped them do it - but they made sure to do it outside of the United States.

What The Scientists Did

Ethically challenged physics researcher Cesar Hidalgo used cell phone towers to track the locations of more than 100,000 people whenever they made or received phone calls and SMS over a six month time period. Hidalgo and fellow researchers used the installed tracking technology in the phones of another 206 unwitting people, checking in on where they were every two hours. The conclusion: most people don't go that far from home in their every day lives. Almost half of the people tracked generally stayed within the same six mile area. Shocking, isn't it? Now just imagine what they could find out if people were given implants unknowingly.

That's Worse Than Creepy

It's reminiscent of the MIT researcher we wrote about last year who is collecting "passive social graph data" by watching whose cell phones come near who else's, something he calls "reality mining."

In this case, though, the subjects of the Northeastern study didn't know they were being tracked and studied. Hidalgo says that's ok because they were studied in anonymous aggregate. "In the wrong hands the data could be misused," Hidalgo told CNN. "But in scientists' hands you're trying to look at broad patterns.... We're not trying to do evil things. We're trying to make the world a little better." Tell that to a long history of science experiment subjects tested against their will.

Even the study of people in anonymous aggregate needs to be opt-in, otherwise there's just too much trust being put in anonymous researchers.

This is why we celebrated FireEagle as much as we did when it launched. That platform for other location aware services to collect data through asks users on a regular basis if they are ok with FireEagle continuing to keep track of their location reports.

That's beyond opt-in, it's respectfully, effectively communicative. Anything less is reason to reject location awareness in general.

Creepy eye photo by Flickr user Jimmy_joe

But there are plenty of potential hangups. Take the deal that CBS announced this morning with mobile social network Loopt. CBS plans to use Loopt's GPS technology to deliver location based ads to CBS mobile users. These aren't exactly like the scenario I announced above, since CBS will be displaying location-aware ads on top of mobile content rather than deliver them via text message. That actually highlights the first problem with location based advertising.

It would take a perfect confluence of events in order for many ads to make sense. Not only do you have to be near the thing that is being advertised, but you also need to be viewing the CBS mobile site. For entities like Starbucks that exist on every street corner, that might not be an issue, but in practice how often do you think you'll be in the proximity of one of CBS' advertisers while you're viewing the site? It'll happen, sure, but it drastically cuts down on the number of opportunities to deliver location aware mobile ads when you have to be viewing a specific mobile web page at just the right time to receive an ad.

CBS can, of course, deliver more general ads fixed to your location -- but is that really taking advantage of the GPS capabilities that Loopt offers? Yeah, it's neat to see ads for things in the city I am traveling in, but not as neat as seeing ads for the businesses on the street I'm walking down.

The fix for that, of course, is to deliver the ads by text message, triggered by proximity to the advertiser's storefront. We questioned in December whether mobile ad startup Fluc would be able to fill inventory for a similar type of ad scheme (though is isn't clear if Fluc is actually targeting ads by GPS or if they're just asking users where they are located). "If the GAP knows you're near a mall where they have an anchor store, and they know from your Fluc account that you fit their consumer profile, then they might pay to send you an ad," we wrote. "That's a lot of 'ifs,' though."

Further, ads like this have to be opt-in. Not only is there a privacy issue involved, but text message ads are also the least likely to be trusted by consumers, according to a Nielsen Internet survey. The CBS-Loopt ads are opt-in.

Another hangup with the idea of location-based ads is reach. Right now the CBS ads are only available to customers using a GPS-enabled phone on a network that Loopt has a partnership with -- so far that means just people on Sprint Nextel or Boost Mobile. Loopt's CEO predicts that by the end of 2008 there could be 50 million mobile phones in the United States equipped to receive this type of advertising, but for now the audience remains relatively small.

Even so, location based advertising is a tantalizing vision for the industry. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said last week that location based ads are the future and will lead a revolution in mobile advertising. Last year Google launched a mobile version of AdSense and their own mobile OS. I think we can expect location aware ads from them in the near future. And whatever Google does in the world of advertising, you can bet others will follow suit.

The ad scenario I described above is possible (and it can get even spookier and more finely targeted when mashed up with other data -- say, your social networking profiles), but it's probably not quite here yet. At least, I haven't seen it. The question is -- do we even want that? Should we potentially trade more of our privacy for more relevant advertising? What does a dollar off a latte mean to you?