Mike Blumenthal posted this article today: Geolocation going mainstream - OS X to have by January?:

In a recent post Parsons speculates that ‘All eyes then (will be) on Macworld in January, I would be surprised if we don’t… see a location API as a new feature of Snow Leopard.’

With most operating system being location aware, the local ad marketplace will expand dramatically.

In another post, the Social Media specialist Chris Brogan rumbles about the innate potential of Brightkite. The blogger thinks that Brightkite generates such a valuable geolocated information that it should consider fueling other services with this black gold. And he adds:

Don’t you dare start by envisioning marketing opportunities messing up this information flow. Instead, think of what would exist beyond marketing, in the marketplace itself. What would come first? How could we educate? What would history lessons look like through a mobile browser? How will we take the tattered web back to the larger screens, and then back again, in ways that add to it all?

Nice way to start a philosophical reflection upon the benefits of location-aware computers. While Mike Blumenthals focuses on the advertising benefits of tracking users’ locations, Chris Brogan invites us to encompass the collaborative possibilities of geolocation that can lead to a greater collective Knowledge.

Unfortunately, visionaries have to deal with facts too. Michael Arrington wrote an article today on Techcrunch about the recent success of Loopt, the location-aware iPhone application.

Loopt, one of a handful of location-aware iPhone social networks (and the one we are partnered with), is currently (meaning over the recent period, undefined by Apple) the 20th most popular free iPhone application, and is being downloaded more often than both Facebook and MySpace.

In the comments section, the enthusiasm about the application is reversed. The problem with location aware applications is that users need to open the app to ping their location to the service. One commenter says:

Apple’s iPhone apps cannot run in the background! You have to manually launch all the apps and manually make updates… one app at a time.

90% of all the social iPhone apps, especially the geo-aware social apps, are USELESS until the iPhone can run them in the background & let the user multitask.

That’s a very good point: that it be the operating system, or the social app, the device that transmits geo-location information has to be enabled. The question should not be “Is geolocation going mainstream?”, but rather “do people want to be geolocated?”

Will I tweak my Firefox, Windows 7, G1, and so on, to make myself transparent. Shouldn’t I be able to opt in on being geolocated? Isn’t it just a bunch of businesses that will capitalize on knowing where I am?

Geolocation is not mainstream yet. The local ad market is ready, but the rules of permanent geo-tracking still have to be set.

Today, Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google Mobile Team, announced some pretty sweet news, the Gears Geolocation API for all laptop WiFi users:

I am thrilled to announce that today we have enhanced the Gears Geolocation API so that developers can now securely locate users to within 200m accuracy in major desktop browsers in hundreds of cities around the world. Whether your users are Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or (soon) Opera users, you can now automatically deliver an experience that is tailored to their current location.

The original purpose of the Gears Geolocation API was to make it easy for developers to deliver location enabled web sites on mobile phones. However, the team realized laptop users would benefit from location enabled web sites too.

Keir Clark gives a good example how this technology can be applied:

Independent Television News have created a news map that delivers news based on the user’s location. The map uses the Google Gears Geolocation API to determine the user’s location and then serves up news for that region.

As Stephen Shankland mentions on Webware:

Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user’s location. That service is being built into Firefox 3.1, too, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS or presumably Gears, to retrieve location information.

The Gears Geolocation API is completely free for developers. However, the location-tracking technology raises some concerns over privacy issues. First, the API will not record user location, but third-party Website can and probably will. To remedy to this problem, “Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time and the user can either allow or deny your site permission.“

The geo-based Web is turning into a major trend thanks to the Internet juggernauts’ investment in location-based technologies. The Gears Geolocation API is an amazing opportunity for site owners to include geo-marketing in their content optimization strategy. So make your marks in the geo-Web, build maps, lots of them, and own as many markers as possible, because more and more, this is how people are finding you online.

… Of course it is there. Who can doubt it for a second? The challenge is not to see it coming, but to figure out how it should be rolled out. It takes one hell of a technology to track human beings geographically and offer an interaction based on that geodata.

This week, the GigaOM Mobilize Conference took place, gathering a handful of top execs from the mobile space.

“Big advertisers aren’t interested in location based today,” said Lee Ott, Global Director, Yahoo oneSearch. “They just want to get in front of their customers.” But then he added that “making location an attribute of targeted advertising is on the way.” (via Vator)

That is a good step forward: Geobased advertising is indeed a great targeting feature for advertisers, probably more valuable than demographics-based or social graph-based targeting technologies. Unfortunately, the Conference was mostly about identifying the existing mobile infrastructure issues that create clutter in the deployment of the geo-based Web. Not there yet.

There cannot be too much precipitation into this new geoWeb phenomenon. The technology is not ready yet. Online maps providers do not offer bullet-proof mapping solutions. Maps are the core of the much anticipated geoWeb: At Click2Map, we analyze of lot of different behaviors around map creation and map distribution. Conclusion so far: Online maps’ interfaces are not very user-friendly, and the purpose of interacting with a map is not clear yet for mainstream consumers.

For example, a map search for a Chilean wine will often take you to a wine store based in New Jersey that sells this wine, whereas you as a user was just curious to see the landscape (via Earth) where the wine grew on. The search algorithm for maps does not integrate users’ intentions (intentions as John Battelle defined it). From this standpoint, it would be craziness for advertisers to throw their marketing budgets in such a clunky technology. Not there yet.

Today, the growth of online maps is still nurtured by passionate early-adopters. Mainstream consumers won’t accept going through the clutter of a technology that’s not consumer-ready.

However, video games developers are already starting to run wild with the technology provided by online maps’ juggernaut. As found via Veryspatial, this game below integrates geoWeb technologies to offer a near-real-life experience to its players. Just like Second Life inspired many to consider 3D collaboration spaces (like IBM) as a productivity solution, location-based gaming (Jess of Veryspatial calls it LBG, sounds kind of like LGBT to me, but probably because I live in San Francisco) could be the gateway that will allow the transition to geo-based Web services. At least, let’s hope so.