The buzz at South by Southwest this year wasn’t about Twitter’s new profit model (oh wait, there isn’t one) or the iPad’s magazine newsstand (yup, still waiting on that one too). It was on location-based social media. In fact, reports from Austin that the crowds at SXSW were moving en masse from one party or panel to another didn’t come from columnists or bloggers. It came in real time.
Using apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla, attendees “checked in” to various parties and events at the conference. The scary part? They could check to see if there were a lot of people going to certain events – or if they knew people there. This sounds like a party planner’s worst nightmare.
David Carr, my favorite New York Times writer, wrote a great article about the location-based movement at SXSW. In it he lays out the location-based social media services that are coming your way:
- Twitter introduced a location-awareness function at SXSW.
- Facebook will “soon flip the switch” for their smartphone users.
- Yelp has added a check-in feature.
- Google’s Latitude application lets you see if your Gchat buds are closeby.
- Apple is patenting iGroup, which will allow iPhone users to see who is near.
But is all this location-based social media getting a little too close for comfort? Would I really want my Twitter followers and Facebook friends (I link ‘em) to know that I’m the mayor of Eighteenth Street Lounge for the seventh Saturday night in a row? Even scarier: Would I want them to know when I’m home, where home is, and exactly when I leave my house so they can break in?
Am I paranoid? Maybe. But this social media nerd just isn’t buying into GPS mapping my every move. Yet.
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Stalker’s are already abusing existing technologies to figure out where people are making the target’s of their attention miserable. These new features being added to all of our social media are very dangerous. Protesters in Iran were not long ago arrested and detained when facebook just changed the privacy settings. Imagine how horrifying it would be if government’s just used facebook to find and you and put you away? First they’d know what you think, then they know where you are.
At the same time perhaps we can also catch criminals more easily, find kidnapped children faster, find a doctor nearby if you need one. One hopes that we will be able to opt in or out of these features.
Gpymd, I remember naysayers saying the same thing when people started using answering machines, but we seem to have survived.