Location based micro-blogging is gaining momentum with Google unveiling Google Latitude, the latest on location-awareness / microblogging front. In November Nokia released Nokia Friend View and in December proclaimed at Nokia World that their strategy is to coordinate peoples lives and have images of people showing up on maps.
There evident user benefits from social networking meeting maps - digital serendipity; increased and richer communication. Google Latitude provides quick way to contact friends via SMS, IM or phone call. It's also integrated with GoogleTalk and lets the user set his status & photo. In Google Latitude the user is promised to have full control of his privacy settings - easy sharing or hiding his own location.
Nokia Friend View is an experimental research project that positions itself as an "exciting location and micro-blogging services that helps you stay in touch with your close friends". It also enables to arrange meetings with friends that are near by at any given moment. User can manually set the location he prefers to have a meeting at and send invites to his friends.
Social location services provide very powerful platforms for new type of advertising, merchandizing and communication business models. Knowing who is where and what they like could provide very high pay per clicks for the agile seller. These platforms are battles of giants. It will be interesting to see how the big operators are reacting and what kind of startups emerge around the space.
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