How Does Location Based Services Work

Location-based services: Are they there yet?

We look at Facebook, Foursquare, Google Latitude and Yelp to see how their mobile location-based services have prospered -- or not.

Mobile users are more connected to the Net than ever. As of Dec 2011, ComScore estimated that at that place are 97.9 1000000 smartphone users in the U.Due south. -- virtually a third of the total population.

Almost every i of those devices can provide its location to services in which users choose to participate, allowing them to tell their friends where they are, what businesses they frequent and how those businesses perform. For example, a retail store might offer discounts to entice customers to allow their friends know where they're shopping and how skilful the store is.

Just not all location-based services -- or their mobile apps -- are created equal.

What follows is a look at the groundwork and differing approaches of four major social media platforms that provide LBS, with a special eye to what information technology all means for businesses that are looking to connect to customers. Two of the four networks, Square and Google Latitude, are completely location-based; the other ii, Facebook and Yelp, are social networks that have incorporated location-based services into their existing infrastructures.

Facebook

The LBS story of Facebook is -- and in that location'due south an irony alarm here -- far from being liked. While Facebook has done a pretty skilful job of monetizing advertising, social mechanics and user-contributed content, it has pretty much fumbled the LBS brawl to engagement.

Many industry analysts and pundits thought that when Facebook launched its Facebook Places service in Aug. 2010, it would spell doom for the Square LBS. With bank check-ins and the capability to see which friends were nearby, Places was meant to give mobile Facebook users power to track and be tracked by the popular social media site's members. It would also give local advertisers (and by extension, Facebook) access to a lot of hyper-local customers -- literally, people who were just down the street.

But Facebook Places completely failed to take off, to the extent that just a twelvemonth later on its launch, Places was essentially deactivated. Facebook still retains some LBS functionality: mobile users can opt to attach their location to their status updates and check in at business locations. Only business participation in Facebook's bank check-in program is minimal; a quick survey of Chicago check-in deals yielded just five hits.

Altimeter Grouping mobile analyst Chris Silva sees the pullback non equally a failure of the Places tool, but rather a retreat on the part of Facebook from a faltering mobile strategy. In February, Facebook's own pre-IPO S-1 filing all only admitted the flaw, which Silva pointed out on his blog.

"Sounds like a problem -- the biggest-news IPO in Silicon Valley is essentially albeit it's concerned with its prospects for monetizing mobile users," Silva wrote.

Today, Silva is convinced that Facebook must and will plow itself back to the mobile environment. "Their next pace is inherently mobile," Silva emphasizes.

For now, however, mobile is taking a back seat. Facebook'due south "focus is on the ads right now," explains Shon Christy, founder and president of Christy Artistic, LLC, a midwestern social media marketing firm, "particularly ads that are part of Facebook's Reach Generator ad packaging plan." The Attain Generator programme, launched past Facebook at the end of February, enables participants to promote posts from their pages and pay via an ongoing payment programme, rather than per-click.

Still, Facebook can't exist counted out completely out yet as an LBS player, for two reasons.

First, in tardily 2011, Facebook announced that it had hired pretty much all of the developers and engineers from Gowalla, an LBS-based social media platform that focused on social-network city guides using members' photos and descriptions. Facebook did ane of its famous acqui-hires -- instead of buying the company outright, information technology picked up the talent but left the engineering and the service alone. Every bit a result, Gowalla ended up shuttering itself on March 12, 2012.

Second, Facebook has rolled out its new Timeline characteristic to users, a chronological tool which has become its default interface. The Facebook location-sharing tool enables users to assign location information to events, images and statuses throughout their Timeline "history." As a result, location will become much more than a part of the user's story, interwoven with all the other backdrop of Facebook posts.

With the Gowalla brain trust on lath, information technology is non unreasonable to expect more than location-oriented functions to appear inside Facebook as the Timeline continues to roll out. Mobile users might want to go on an middle out.

(Story continues on next page.)