Imagine you’re stuck at a foreign airport, your flight heavily delayed. You’re alone, miserable and unwilling to spend €3 per second to phone home. By pure chance you bump into an old colleague that you haven’t seen in years. You spend a pleasant couple of hours catching up while the ash clears.
Now imagine your cellphone could automatically detect that that colleague was nearby and take the randomness out of your serendipitous encounter?
That’s exactly what the gathering wave of “location-based social networks” is already doing.
While the name is horribly unwieldy, the idea is not. It simply adds a new dimension to social networking: a person’s physical location. The concept has all the inevitability of a toddler’s development, from “I am Sam” to “let’s be friends” to “here I am!”
In fact the only reason such services didn’t emerge earlier is that cellphones weren’t yet sufficiently advanced enough to support them. But the new generation of smartphones with built-in GPS and always-on internet connections is fertile ground for these new frontiersmen.
All of the services are variations on a simple theme: a way to broadcast your current location to your network of friends. So if you’re popping down to the local coffee shop you can let all your buddies know with a stroke of your thumb.
Natural competitive streak
But who would want to reveal their location to the world?
Millions of people by the looks of things. Foursquare, the largest of these networks, recently signed up its millionth member and its competitors like Gowalla and Brightkite are hot on its heels.
One of the things that has made Foursquare so successful is its game-like elements. Each time you visit a spot — say your local book shop — you earn points. Once you earn the most points for that location, you become the “mayor”.
Even this smidgen of fame is enough to bring out our natural competitive streak. Avid fans of everything from hairdressers to pool halls have been visiting them more often in order to retain their mayoral titles. Foursquare has even arranged loyalty deals that give these virtual dignitaries discounts on goods and services.
And this isn’t just another Silicon Valley fad. A crew of local entrepreneurs, backed by Vodacom, has just launched a groundbreaking game called Legends of the Echo right here in South Africa. At a stroke the project combines three of the tech world’s hottest trends: massively multiplayer online gaming, mobile gaming and location-based social networking.
There’s already a fair amount of Orwellian hand wringing in the press about all these services. For those horrified by the idea of Facebook and Twitter, Foursquare seems like the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.
There are, of course, potential drawbacks to any new technology. A group of Dutch provocateurs made this very clear by launching PleaseRobMe.com — a PR stunt aimed at highlighting the dangers of “over-sharing”.
But, like it or not, this new wave is quickly gathering momentum. If rumours are to be believed, Facebook will be entering the location game in a matter of weeks.
The internet has long been accused of making us less social, and more inclined to stare at a screen than talk to each other. If location-based social networking gets us out and about and meeting new people, then long may it reign.
Follow Alistair on Twitter: @afairweather http://twitter.com/afairweather