Today, Glympse is launching. Glympse is a location-aware application for your mobile that lets you share your location with whoever you want. On this blog, I like to talk about location-aware technologies, because it shows how online maps are becoming a hot medium. Google Maps are at the root of all those new location-based social networks (I know, Loopt uses Mappoint).

A few days ago, I met the CEO and Co-Founder of Glympse - Bryan Trussel - for an interview, and I saved a bit of our chat for the Click2Map blog. I like this part because it talks about how the Web 1.0 was a physical space getaway, but it slowly turned inside out over time to become the best indicator of our physical existence.

This new trend makes me wonder if our next social profiles online will be maps, and the next big social network will be the place where users can feed their location in (through Latitude for example) and customize the looks of their maps. A map of my whereabouts is the best way to define who I am (hint hint Antony

No, GeoAggregateMe doesn’t actually exist, and if it did, it would have a different, sexier name. But for ambitious developpers out there, aggregating people’s whereabouts and thoughts might just be the next big thing.

The real deception with the 2.0-transformed Web is the timid space it created for advertisers in our interpersonal conversations. No cash, no growth, no accomplishment. However, smartphones are bringing the beat back by tracking down users’ locations, which opens up the doors of live geo-targeting for local businesses. Whatever I do, my location is enough info for some advertiser to show me its ad.

Who are those Web services that know who you are and where you are going? There are a few:

- First there is Google. As I wrote last week, Google’s got a Local Business Center, Android, Gears, Latitude, Google Maps, and so on. They are tracking us down like it’s nobody’s business.
- Thanks to its mobile integration, Twitter gets a lot of location juice that will undoubtedly attract advertisers.
- Facebook knows a bunch about users’ location but they face a different privacy issue that Twitter does.
- The geosocial tool Loopt gets pings from users several times a day.
- There is also Yelp. On Yelp, you say where you’ve been, and give your appreciation of that place. Goldmine for geo-targeting purposes!

The same way we have bits of discussions all over the Web and have a hard time putting the pieces back together, our location is shattered over different services. It would be nice if 1. those services opened up their users’ location data, and 2. a Friendfeed for geodata opened its doors.

GeoAggregateMe would generate a shameless amount of geodata on its users: Such a service could be fun and profitable.

Yesterday, the Google geo development team released the Latitude GeoRSS feed into the wild through an API. I find it surprising that Google is opening up its users’ geo-data this fast. Here’s why:

In this very young geo-location space, Google is taking a major lead with Android. It turns them into one of the rare Web-based service that tracks directly users’ location. Android’s numbers aren’t tearing the roof off, but they are not bad either: In March, AdMob reported that Android phones experienced a 44% monthly growth are in the first months after launch, while the iPhone got a 88% monthly growth rate (however, I would like to compare the marketing spend of both companies for the launch, Apple obviously had more buzz).

The reason this is an advantage for Google is mobile advertising. The Web on mobile will probably become the most profitable advertising channel for brands and local advertisers alike. A plethora of ad networks are popping up in this space. However, while focusing on serving ads, those ad networks will have to buy the geo-data juice from data providers… Like Google: Latitude encourages mobile users’ to share their location voluntarily and regularly. Payday!

So why is Google releasing its geo-juice so fast?

We have tried to make this process as easy as possible, but we realize there is an entirely different set of people (you guys, the developers!) that want to do more interesting things with their location.

In other words, they are creating a developers’ ecosystem around their geo-data center, which creates many benefits:
- Start developing geo-advertising solutions on Google’s platform
- Develop good ideas for Adwords to integrate later
- Maybe develop an economy around Latitude (and Android?)
- Pioneer to become a leading geo data provider.

However, Google’s Achille’s heel in this story is its social networking potential: It’s close to being null. On Google, you search, you create documents, you watch videos, but Google doesn’t connect you with your close ones the way Facebook does. Their social graph algo is known to be a bit screwy. So they will need the help of somebody else to capture our location while we socialize on the go.

I have enabled the ’share your location publicly’. I don’t find it scary. I have the feeling that nobody really cares where I am anyway (except advertisers). And it’s not that accurate anyway. But I really like updating my gtalk with my location. Geekilicious!

Geo-blogger Glenn at the GIS user blog shares his new passion for the Google Phone and the Twitter apps for Android. Personally, I haven’t found an app on the market that provides a positive twittering experience, but I have a little tweak to share that combines two Android apps in a geolicious way!

First, install MyTracks, the GPS track recorder from the Google team. If you jog for example, use this app to record your track every time, and compare your performance through the Google Spreadsheets the app generates for you. Your phone just turned into a physical performance booster there

Once you got MyTracks up-and-running, install Twidroid, the twitter app for Android. If you are like me and you do not like the noise of Twitter apps, go in the settings and turn off the notifications from your friends.

Now that you have those two apps running on your phone, next time you do your jogging around the park, here is what you will do:
Record your track - Hit ’share maps with friends’ in MyTracks - Select Twidroid.

Once Google generated a map for your track, Twidroid sends it right away to your Twitter stream, notifying your followers of your performance of the day. You could be more precise in your tweet, by adding “san francisco, dolores park, jogging’ in your tweet for example, so that other tweeps jogging in the same area can find you.

I find this app combo to be super easy to use, and also a real life-changer if you have been looking to hook up with other people on Twitter around outdoors activities.

To push this combo a bit further, let’s say that you want to share this map with a friend that has a Facebook profile, but no Twitter account. No biggie. Just install the Selective Twitter Status app on Facebook. Next time you recorded a track you want to show to your Facebook friend, just send him a shout out the way I described above, and add #fb at the end of your tweet.

I have tested it and it works wonderfully well.

in this blog, I usually talk about mapping and new technologies at large. I am very fond of location-aware applications, so I talk a lot about that too. All that talk has one converging point: It’s all on a map, and I can’t stress enough on the necessity for organizations and businesses to put themselves on the map too.

Yesterday night, I attended the SFnewtech Meetup, popular event for techies here in the Silicon Valley. I enjoyed most of the startups that went on stage. There was one presentation I thought I had to capture and share with the readers of this blog: Skout. Skout is a mobile location-based social dating service. That’s a lot of words, but it’s pretty self-explanatory: When you are in a bar, instead of daring a move with a person you find attractive, check if that person is on Skout.

When you open the Skout application on your mobile (any mobile), it will spot the members of the Skout’s network in your surroundings, which you can browse to find that person you like . “Yea, right, as if everybody was on Skout!” Well the team has a nice idea to make this happen: They worked out partnerships with popular nightlife places to display flat screens that will show members of the Skout network here in the event, a nice way to push everyone to create their profile on Skout.

So this is not directly about map creation, but I wanted to share this video because it shows the potential of location-aware technologies, and the fact that it is happening today. Skout won the DEMO 09 Demogod award.

In a very interesting post on the O’Reilly Radar blog, Robert Kaye explains in detail the work of Sense Networks, which specializes in taking GPS and mobile phone location data and deriving as much useful information as possible from it. In a nutshell, here is the kind of information they come up with:

For instance, Sense Networks can can deduce the activity of bankers in the financial district of San Francisco. Given that a cell phone moved to the financial district in the morning and stayed there for 8 hours, they assumed the signal came from a banker. Associating signals to movement patterns allow Sense Networks to start correlating the DOW and when bankers arrive at work. Apparently when the DOW is up, bankers are more likely to head into work sooner, but when the DOW is down, bankers are likely to take their time getting to work. Tony’s team can also correlate between night life and the health of the DOW — when the DOW is healthy more people move from work to popular night time spots, and less so when the DOW is down.

In other words, our whereabouts in a day reflects who we are. To make this data interesting, the Sense Networks team couples it with commerce information. Therefore, not only do they track the daily trends of different categories of people, but they can also determine their global consuming habits. The whole point of Sense Networks is to provide the next-gen of mobile advertising, one based on geo-sociological trends.

The process to identify groups of people according to the places they visit is not an easy task: Sense Networks attributes 487,500 dimensions to every place in a city, thus identifying a unique and complex “DNA” which describes it completely. The donuts shop down the street has now more to its business than just a few donuts and some grease on the entrance door!

This technology sounds way ahead of the curve. Its accuracy is limited to the populations within which the majority has a GPS-enabled device. But its mere existence shows the inevitable direction new technologies are heading towards: location-awareness and business geo-location.

As explained on the Sense Networks Website, one of the two forces that have caused an explosion in the number of Internet connected location-enabled devices is the massive demand for navigation services and real-time traffic information. Having a location-aware device helps make people’s lives better. Yesterday, it was mostly used for driving around and avoiding traffic. Today, it helps friends connect based on their whereabouts. Tomorrow, it will provide smarter consuming tips, much smarter than Google’s behavioral ad targeting technology. And it will provide it in the now and then, while you’re on the go.

The question of data privacy is a big issue. Sense Networks has a principles page for people who always read the fine prints :

Meaningful benefits include compelling applications to help manage life better, or personalized services based on anonymous learning from “users like me.” People should be able to enjoy the benefits of these services simply in exchange for their data.

I couldn’t agree more. Facebook is the perfect example of a company that successfully brought real people’s identity online in exchange of a smooth networking experience. I am glad to give away my real information to Facebook because I generate a significant benefit out of it. If a company were to track me down everywhere I go, define what kind of consumer I am, for the sole purpose of making me even smarter in my everyday life, I would obviously go for it. Therein lies technology’s disturbing logic: it makes you dumber to refuse being smarter.

I think this is exactly why Twitter founders do not talk too much about their development strategies: As soon as an idea slips out of their mouth, it becomes the next Twitter we should all expect in the coming days.

This week end, Techcrunch reported on an interview Evan Williams had with Der Spiegel, where he mentions that Twitter could possibly delivers local breaking news to users based on their locations. Everybody is getting excited about it, as you can read in the comments of the Techcrunch article, but there is something that doesn’t fit in this story: Twitter doesn’t know where I am.

It is true, Twitter is not a geolocation company. It doesn’t track people based on their location and deliver services based on those locations. Yes, for ‘tweeps’ using smartphones, a latitude/longitude will be attached to all tweets transmitted to the phone. Other desktop apps will also attach your location to the tweets you send. On users’ profiles, you will see a location, but users would need to constantly update their feeds to make this location accurate in the here and now. I see this geolocation feature mainly as a way for tweeps to easily spot other tweeps.

Twitter has a problem: it is too noisy. I only use Twitter as a search engine, and for succinct communications with unknown others. Anyone who tracks their Thwirl, Tweetdeck and other app all day long to follow discussions is losing an incredible amount of time and productivity. Too many people use it has a way to grow an audience, following thousands of other tweeps, expecting follow-backs, with no intent to actually connect with the people they follow.

Anyhow, my point is that there is too much noise on Twitter. So if you couple this fact with the fact that Twitter would do a bad job delivering geo-targeted local news, you see how your stream would get even more polluted. Twitter is in no position to do this.

One interesting fact is that Twitter was early-funded by Union Square Ventures, the same VCs that early-funded Outside.in, the site that tracks the Web for news in your area. Now maybe it would be a good idea if Outside.in users could subscribe to the local news through their Twitter stream. But that’s a different story.

Finally, to spot geolocated Twitter feeds, there is Twinkle. It works great, and fits the need of the niche that is interested in getting geolocated news in their feeds.

Another way to see it is that users could turn on an alert whenever they want to get geolocated tweets in their streams. In that case, Twitter would need to have a GPS-enabled technology to track users on the go (a tracking system that doesn’t require sending tweets to be found). If Latitude is planning on opening up an API, I guess this is something doable…

About two weeks ago, Google launched the MyTracks application, which purpose is to track your whereabouts through your smartphone, and share this itinerary through a Google Maps or a KML file.

In a more recent discussion, Corvida from Shegeeks writes about the importance of location-awareness services. She states:

“With money becoming tight around households it’s no surprise that people may be spending less time traveling from city to city and more time exploring the options available in their own city thanks to the “recession”. [...] With people venturing out more in their own city, they’re more likely to use location-awareness services to find new events and venues to explore.”

In other words, when short on cash, we tend to look for the closest and most affordable solutions for our daily consuming needs. A geolocation search is the appropriate tool for this type of demand, and today’s well-geolocated businesses are grabbing an increasing number of market shares. If you are a professional and seek to grow your geolocated presence, consider these powerful tools to successfully reach your objective. They will help you build a strong presence on Google Maps.

Another one of Corvida’s bullet point about the importance of location-aware services is the resulting social networking potential. I am not entirely convinced by the ‘meet-new-people-in-your-area’ potential of location-awareness services, unless it is in a given context like a conference or a concert. However, I believe that mapping your whereabouts - with MyTracks for example - is a way to bring people closer in a more meaningful way.

Here is an example: My wife lives on the other side of the globe, and we also have an 18-month-young son. For practical reasons, my son is now staying with me in San Francisco where he was born. There is no need to say how tormenting it is for the mom to have her little boy live 5576.4 miles away from her. Thanks to new Web technologies, it is becoming easier to be constantly connected to one another, share our daily activities, and therefore feel closer to one another.

The location-awareness tool MyTracks dramatically helps us enhance this long-distance connection. Tonight, I took my boy on a walk around my neighborhood. I turned on the MyTracks app on my phone, and slowly headed to the Safeway to purchase diapers. When I got home, I stopped MyTracks and sent the itinerary to my wife by email, with a little message attached saying: ‘hey Mommy, I went for a walk with Daddy, here are all the places I saw today!’ With the Streetview feature, my wife can literally replicate our walk around the neighborhood. Now isn’t that the most value you can get out of location-awareness services?

Here is the itinerary:

View Larger Map

Since the launch of Android-powered phones, Google has been active in releasing geolocation-related features. Last week, we covered the launch of Latitude, the service from the Mountain View-based search engine that lets you share your “exact” location with your friends on the spot. This week (Thursday to be precise), Google released My Tracks, a new application that enables users to easily share their outdoor activities with others.

From the official Google Blog:

My Tracks records tracks of outdoor activities using the phone’s built-in GPS. It shows these tracks on a map and presents live statistics, including an elevation profile. And here’s the best part: it lets you easily share your activities with friends and the world using Google Maps, as well as archive your training history with Google Docs.

(the Google Latlong blog also covers the launch)

Where Latitude received mixed reactions from the blogosphere for being a creepy app, My Tracks comes to the rescue to show how useful and fun geo-tracking can actually be. My Tracks is not pioneering this GPS application: hem, Map My Tracks is another independent application that does about the same, except that their app can be installed on over 100 different Web-enabled phones.

Stephen Shankland from Cnet tested the new app. He identified two main glitches with My Tracks: First, enabling GPS tracking on the G1 is extremely battery-consuming, where a Garmin device will last two days on two AA batteries. Second, it seems like Google isn’t accurate enough with its GPS tracking technology yet: altitude is never accurate, and you’re lucky if the marker of yourself on the map doesn’t put you 20 feet (or more) from where you actually are. On the good side of things, Stephen Shankland appreciated the sharing features associated with the app:

The ability to Twitter and e-mail links to maps is nice, and I e-mailed myself the KML file of my trip with no trouble, letting me view it in Google Earth at my leisure.

There are ups and down to Google’s new app. Nonetheless, what we are seeing here is the integration of geolocation technologies settling in our daily lives at the speed of light. Most people still don’t see how this technology applies to their daily needs, but faster then they will know, the technology will be embedded in their phones, and will become a main component of their daily activities! And once again, the businesses that did not ignore their geo-marketing potential will live happily ever after!

One day you ask yourself if being tracked through GPS is not a tad disturbing, if this is something people would adopt, and the next day you read that tracking your friends on a map is now possible 24/7. Google announced yesterday the upcoming release of Latitude, A simple service that will ping your location every once in a while, and let a selected few of your choice know about it.

Latitude will be accessible for all G1, iPhones, Blackberry, and javascript-enabled phones in general. The privacy settings give users leeway in terms of public accessibility: Google’s servers don’t track movements, they merely provide the last waypoint where a user was marked. This means that you can’t track anyone’s daily pattern of movement. You can also determine the specificity of your beacon, showing an exact city block or just the city itself. Only friends on your contact list can see your location. You can set up different privacy levels for each contacts though.

Latitude is not a mobile-only experience. There is a Latitude gadget for iGoogle to spot friends from your laptop (Gmail contacts of course). Latitude will track your mobile location, and through Gears, it will also track your laptop position.

Shegeeks‘ blogger Corvida brings an interesting point in a blog post on Louis Gray’s blog: Location-aware services such as Loopt and Brightkite should thank Google for publicizing a service that they do better than Google for the moment.

Brightkite introduces me to new people to hang out with. [...] The amount of information available for specific check-in spots is amazing! I can see who’s been there, how many times they’ve been there, check out their profile and see if we have similar interests. Hey, they might even be friends with me on Twitter! For this sole reason alone, Brightkite and other similar services have nothing to fear for now. In fact, they might want to thank Google.

I shared a few comments in this post, where I argue that Google is more interested in building a back-end geolocalization technology that would seamlessly integrate with other Google products. latitude is just a way to get things started.

On the Fast Company site, Chris Dannen brings up the idea that Latitude could work in perfect harmony with Local Business Center, Google’s own Yellow Pages:

You don’t have to be Al Gore to see the potential; if advertisers can tap into your location and mash it up with locations of their outlets or services and your browsing history, you’ll be hit with perhaps the most targeted ads humankind has ever known. Imagine having your mobile phone kindly inform you that you’re two blocks from your best friend, and in between you both, there lies a Starbucks where you two can meet.

That sounds like something Google would do. Mapping technologies over at Google are not ready yet to support such a complex operation. Google Maps is barely in its early monetization days, so everything is going to remain pretty experimental for the next 2 or 3 years to come.