The future of social networking is creepy

The term “creeping” is fondly used to describe friends in your social network (like facebook) who don’t actually communicate directly with you, but who know everything about you.  

This is because they have been checking out your profile page, looking at your last set of vacation pictures, comparing their social calendar with your event page and looking at the newest applications you’ve installed on your profile. They’re also creeping your friend list and seeing what others are saying about you. Your current “status” is also super helpful - espeically now that you’ve linked it with your Twitter account.

The future of social networking, even the future of marketing is also looking creepy thanks to new tools and applications that extend interactions beyond your desktop to your mobile device through location based services (LBS).

Leveraging device GPS or using radiolocation and trilateration based on signal strength from local cell towers, marketers face the real possibility of delivering just in time messaging to influence consumer behavior as they prance from location to location.

Before LBS can go mainstream in Canada, there are three barriers that have to be overcome:

1. Not many devices come with built-in GPS – although my fancy Blackberry 8800 has it..as does all their new devices (Curve and Pearl included)
2. Carriers charges to access cell-tower data for LBS is cost-prohibitive for any marketer looking to go beyond GPS
3. Data-plans in Canada for consumers need to be fixed and affordable across ALL carriers

It’s also naïve to think that consumers are going to rush to sign-up for location based services on their mobile device when it does become feasible on a large scale. Today’s consumer has been trained to ignore marketing messages. They simply don’t trust the brands….or the people marketing the brands.

They trust their friends and family though.

Imagine you just discovered a little restaurant with the best wine list ever. Like tagging a website in delicious, you can tag or bookmark the location on your mobile device. The GPS coordinates are then saved. When friends in your network come within a prescribed radius of that restaurant, they will get a text messaging saying “Great wine list at blah blah blah restaurant, and you should like totally go there right now. I mean NOW.” Location based messaging is now a trusted exchange that leverages the social graph of your existing social network. Now that’s got potential.

If you’re already on facebook, check out these location based applications:

1. Friends GPS
2. Brightkite
3. Local updates

If you’re not on facebook (or even if you are), be sure to check out this award winning application from Alcatel called Geopepper. I’ve used the GPS and non-GPS enabled version with some success with friends in my network already.  

Many of the applications / tools I’ve seen that leverage LBS also come with a feature that allows people to manually input their location – so even if they aren’t GPS enabled, they can get messaging specific to their location.

The future of social networking may be creepy, but that’s alright with me.