Sunday 14 October 2007

GPS and social networking: Where are we now?

With social networks such as MySpace and Facebook catching on, anxious techie socialites are now looking for a new way to interact with their friends utilising technological advances. The new fashion? GPS social networking where you can not only communicate with an acquaintance but also track their real-world position too so that a meeting in person can be arranged.

Social networking websites, including, most notably, the likes of Bliin, Trackut and Kakiloc have managed to take the whole concept of social networking one step further. The way they work at the moment is by getting users to subscribe to the service by downloading a small application, which, once activated, enables them to track the location of other social networkers in real time and see whether they are nearby or not.

The obvious dangers of this aside (security being the key word here, despite reassurances from people running these websites, it is obvious to me how many pitfalls revealing a person's constantly updated location to the rest of the world can be!) there seem to be many opportunities with this since most users already using the aforementioned applications are looking for ways to further enhance them. While I wouldn't go as far as suggesting enrolling to one of these services, they are definitely trend-setters for a new market opening up.

Check the following links for more information;



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