Your Location Is Lame!

There is an ever growing popularity in location-based social networking sites like Brightkite, Foursquare, and Gowalla that allow users to tell their friends where they are. Twitter has even joined in on the fun and added geolocation, and there was an announcement today that Facebook would be unveiling location features next month.

These services can be useful for a variety of reasons such as sharing a bad experience at a local business or posting a photo of a beautifully plated entree at a nice restaurant. However, in my opinion, it seems what was a well intended means of dispensing useful information attached to a specific location has made a turn for the worse. The quality of content created has decreased as the popularity of location-based sites increases. Not to mention, most users sync their check-ins on Twitter and Facebook for an endless loop of annoyance.

Here is my list of the 3 most annoying people using location services:

1. Mayor Of Lame Locations. This type of user has no business using location services as they never go anywhere cool. They repetitively check into places like the gym everyday. You stick to your workout regimen, and while I commend you for it, I don't care when and where you work out. Other lame locations include fast food restaurants and the dentist office. Just stop abusing location services and your friends with your lameness.

2. Check-in Whore. This is the person who goes to a place for only 5 minutes just so he or she can tell the world they where there and then moves on to the next place so they can check in there too. They may also travel just so they can check-in at new locations trying to prove to the world how exciting their life is. Well guess what, it's not exciting; it's annoying. Thanks for flooding my Twitter homepage & Facebook news feed with dozens of locations a day and not inviting me to any of them.

3. TMI Locations. No location is too sacred for these users to keep private. They have no regard for the safety of themselves or their family. They have no issues posting their home address or the exact location of the elementary school they just checked into to post they were dropping their son or daughter off. Are you crazy? Please, use a little common sense and think before broadcasting your location to the world.

As more and more social networks jump on the location-based bandwagon, I'm curious what direction users will take it. Will something useful develop from the content or is location check-ins just going to be another thing I block in my Facebook news feed?

UPDATE: Poll Results 3/9/10 - 3/16/10

Does it annoy you when friends sync location-based sites to Twitter & Facebook?
25% Yes
25% No
50% Meh

Safety & Location-Based Social Networking Sites

I recently signed up for a BrightKite account. For those unfamiliar with BrightKite, it's a location-based social networking site that allows users to see where their friends are in real time, and users also have the opportunity to meet new people that are nearby. Users "check-in" to post their current location to BrightKite. This can be an exact location such as an address or name of a restaurant, store, etc., or the location can be more obscure such as just a city and state depending on how the user feels about privacy. There is also a toggle switch to flip back and forth between public and private modes. After checking-in, the user can post photos or notes associated with that location for others to see.

I use the BrightKite app on my iPhone, and the iPhone's location-based services makes checking-in a snap. I've only been using BrightKite for about a month now. Mostly, I keep my location set to my city and state unless I go out to eat or shopping and have something interesting to post. Today, I've been playing around in BrightKite to set placemarks and set privacy settings for each location to get more use out of the service. I start with the two places I'm at the most: home and work. Setting these two locations to private was a no brainer for me personally. Whatever others feel about giving out their home and work addresses online is their business, but I like to keep them private except to a very select group of trusted friends. Then, I turn my attention to other places I take my son to regularly like the park. I debate over whether the park should be public or private when I check-in there. I think, maybe there might be another cool mom there, BrightKite would alert us, and I might make a new friend. But then I feared, publicly giving out the location I was at with my son might lead to some creep stalking us. Risking my son's safety is something I'm not willing to do, so I set the park to private.

Location-based social networking is a very cool thing, but I think a certain amount of caution has to be used. I know BrightKite is just one of the many sites taking on this new frontier, and they have a fastly growing popularity. So, I'm curious who else fancies location-based social networking and who is opposed? What privacy settings do you feel most comfortable with? Any success stories meeting cool new people? Or just stalkers? Please share your stories.

UPDATE: Poll Results 11/18/08 - 11/25/08

Do you use any location-based social networking sites?
66% Yes
00% No
00% Thinking about it
34% Meh