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

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.

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.