Marin and I attended the Using GPS & Location to Enhance Social Networking panel at SXSW. The panelists included Tom Marchioro — Location-based specialist with Garmin, Daniel Gilmartin — Marketing VP with ULocate Communications, Thor Johnson — SVP Media Markets at GyPSii, Brightkite’s founder Martin May, Bryan Jones — CEO at Mobile Blasts and John Adams with Twitter operations.
Adams said microblogging is making an impact around the world with companies communicating in real time. He said location and keyword searches are important. He also said it’s important that different services work with multiple devices. Adams said Twitter doesn’t reveal location data if users choose to keep it private. He hopes that Twitter can offer more location-based services in the future.
Gilmartin works to implement GPS in mobile devices. He believes location is the ultimate contextual experience. He says you take your devices with you wherever you go. Johnson said location is part of the social graph. He said there is a proxy for time, mood, etc. Jones is looking into real world hyperlocal information. You would be able to find out where your friends are, what venues are located near you, etc. He said this would be more helpful than using IM or Email.
May said Brightkites mission is to bring people together around places. They do this by making location an integral part of what you set your status to. May said hashtags would be used to find information by topic or location. Ad hoc social graphs can be created all over the place.
An interesting stat that came out of the panel is that last year 1.9 trillion texts were sent worldwide.
They talked about how interoperability is an admirable goal. Each company would like to work with other networks. The challenge, they said, is that the social graphs are different. They said that people on Twitter follow different people than those on Facebook or Brightkite. They also said that privacy would have to be guaranteed across the board. The panel also said that a “precedence model” would have be set forward – and they don’t know if one is emerging.
The panelists said that GPS could enhance social networking. There are many things that can be done with location. We can connect to those physically around us. It also changes how data is used.