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.