The Great Location Shakeout

Saturday, March 20. 2010

The Great Location Shakeout

Was reading this piece on TechCrunch about location services at SXSW:

At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.

This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.

Indeed. And there are even more location based startups coming.....

I love that all these startups are emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to update across a range of networks.

The outcome of the social wars are well known - concentration into just a few players. This will happen with location based services as well.

In fact I don't know why any startup after the 4th or so in a space bothers, the chance of success is miniscule and the chance of funding is minimal. Better by far to be contrarian and do something that the maddening crowd is not.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Mobile Web 2.0 & Multimedia at 22:15 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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Or, here's an idea, don't check-in with anything unless there's actual value in doing so. Or if you absolutely must check-in, just post to twitter where you are with a #checkin hashtag, and get the applications to do the work 'reading' hashtagged posts.

#1 Joanne Jacobs on 2010-03-21 11:47 (Reply)

@Joanns, I agree - I think the majors will just add location. The only chance the starups have here is to get bought rather than the majors building it themselves

#2 alan p on 2010-03-21 22:10 (Reply)

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