tgoss

MG Siegler of TechCrunch posted a good article on the power of location based services (“LBS”) and how we will derive increasing value from them as they become more mainstream.

I’ll simply add that the most important feature in LBS ability to go mainstream and prove useful will be the handling of the signal to noise ratio: the amount of useful information coming that you care about as compared to the amount of information that your really don’t care about.

Currently, this is a widely discussed topic because for all the utility of the real-time stream, there is an inherent difficulty in separating the information you want from the total amount of information you’re digesting. As you begin following/friending more people the problem gets increasingly more severe. Some people handle this by having few friends and therefore digesting less information. That’s a workable strategy but also self limiting (exactly who’s good enough to make your friends list?)

The real winner here will be the first company that masters how to provide contextually relevant LBS. Google’s pagerank approach to everything may serve as an example to Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare and others aiming to provide LBS.

Ultimately, the situation is similar to the earliest days of email, when it was a pretty big deal if you received an email. It was unique and had a cool factor that went with it. Of course now we all bitch about just how many emails we get and just how many of those are useless crap.

In time, LBS ~~may~~ will develop an identical problem unless some company comes up with a formula for ranking and assigning relevancy to LBS data. As they say at most conferences where real-time is discussed: you may be thirsty, but it’s still tough to drink from the firehose!