Location-based communities in the web
summmer 2009
Location based communities in the web (LBWC) have started to appear over the last years, being repeatedly voted by the consumers to be innovative and exiting for the end user. LBWC utilises its user’s mobile device through mobile network, allowing him or her to share information, which is important to the person. Most commonly it includes user’s location or mapped locations of places that are somewhat important to the user. LBWC also allows other people, who are somehow related to the user, to find out where he or she is or what kind of places does the person like to visit.
New generation mobile phones with GPS support have brought LBWC to a new level, allowing more and more people to use its benefits. Users can publish information to the web straight from their location, with the GPS support allowing also the sharing of geolocation, aside content. This is a noticeable step forward in the development of the Internet, as was the use of multimedia in the web (at first, the Internet consisted only of text).
Acknowledging the importance of the LBWC, one of the oldest professional web communities, CNET, made a new category in the valued WebWare 100 awards. This year, aside the common categories for websites to compete in, there was also a category called Location based services. 30 websites or –utilities competed to be nominated. In the end, ten of them were nominated to be the most innovative products of web-applications in the field of location based services.
To reveal, what is the most common content of these applications, five categories were made:
Restaurants – websites like OpenTable or Yelp provide people the ability to search for restaurants nearby, rate them, make reservations and share opinions regarding the service they offer.
Maps – services like Google Maps or Live Search Maps offer users the ability to search location important to them, create collections of location information and share it with their friends and family.
Travel – websites like TripIt or FlightStats allows people to collect information regarding their travel plans, with options like route-marking, flight search (and information about durance, delays etc).
News – sites like Topix allow users to search news that are related somehow to the user’s current location.
Information – services like PolicyMap and Google Search let the user gain information important to him or her straight from the user’s location.
With the increasing user base, location based services have became also a threat to the persons privacy. people have just now started to realize, that the content they share over the Internet, will be their presumably longer than they expect, thus making the content sharer vulnerable for identity theft, blackmail or public embarrassment. With the conjoining of social networks and location based media the risk of that kind of harm is doubling, as the persons is also sharing it real-time location to the potential perpetrator.
References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_service
- http://www.cnet.com/html/ww/100/2009/about/location.html?tag=mncol
- http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/location-based_mobile_apps_favorites.php
- http://www.google.ee/search?hl=et&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aet%3Aofficial&hs=3ac&q=location+based+communities+the+web&btnG=Otsi&lr=
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