Location Dislocation

From TechCrunch:

Loopt, a mobile social network that can be used to see where your friends are currently located, has partnered with Verizon to put its software on that carrier’s phones. It’s a big win for Loopt since Verizon has more location-aware handsets than any other carrier.

If you don’t know anyone who uses Loopt yet, that’s because the company is still working on getting its technology into more phones across more carriers. Loopt’s primary capability, which the company prefers to call “location sharing” (not user tracking), requires the ability to run location detection software, preferably in the background of a phone so it works while in your pocket. Since location detection is a privileged feature for most carriers, Loopt has needed to work with them one-by-one to reach their users.

Sadly, Location based services have been the Next Big Thing in mobile for as long as "Next Year will be the Year of Mobile Internet" has been around. And every year it moves to next year....so, what might make it this time round? It needs GPS handsets, which are more common - but still fairly rare, and it needs a use case - tracking is still tracking, and the reason these services have failed in the past is that in much (most?) customer research to date anyway, many people just do not want other people to have an expectation of knowing where they are at all times. (recalls total failure a few years ago of child tracking device, when parents realised it could be used for spouse tracking )

Also, consider the "good enoughs" - is it really critical that I do this on my mobile, rather than on a laptop via all those free web apps around - especially as the plan is to charge $4 a month for this single service, rather than on a per-use basis

So - good luck, but I suspect its a few years and iterations away - still, with $17m of VC funding in pocket, they can wait a few cycles out I assume

Smart move by Verizon though, however I would expect that their overall strategy will be to add ever more such applications onto their mobile ecosystem - its hard to tell which will stick, but being a broker never hurts. But $4 pm per service in my opinion won't work, a better model is $5 / mo for a range of user self-provisioned services - in my opinion, of course

Update - In the comments, Phil Bradley said it better than me:

Location is an auxiliary piece of data, not the justification for YASN!

ie its something I'd expect the Verizon ecosystem to expose for all apps to include / mash up - and I'd expect it to be opt-in to work!