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

This is what we keep writing about over an over: mapped business are top-ranked. The reason is not that being on a map is cuter than simply having a Website. Nor is it that geographers are really influential people.

The Web was born world wide, aka any info anywhere retrievable and displayable in front of your eyeballs. Google broke through and became the leader in the search space simply because it was the best at making sense out of this mass of content. In its quest for better search, Google realized that while it was cool to search the world wide web for content, people were intuitively more interested in what was around them (in most cases). More specifically, they want to have more info about the thing that surrounds them.

Hence Google’s focus on geo-technologies and location-aware devices. We often blog about Google’s obsession for geo-related info, because our product helps you be part of this game.

Today, another milestone is being reached, with Google announcing that they will now suggest businesses around your search query on top of their results page, even if there is no location specified in your search query:

We like to make search as easy as we can, so we’ve just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don’t type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you.

Google will mainly base its geo-targeted results in your IP address to determine your location, but they also have other tools to know where you are, like Gears, Chrome, and maybe partnerships with live web services that specialize in tracking where you are and what you do.

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…

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.