‘Checking In’ and ‘Being In’ places

Facebook fully launched its “Places” location-based service (LBS) this week for its 500 million and growing downstream base of users. What does this news mean to CSP LBS in terms of new services business growth potential? First, it uses a product design pattern that should be considered in CSP’s LBS products. Second, it is yet another web-based over-the-top (OTT) service bypassing potential CSP value beyond internet pipe connectivity. Third, it’s got a cool API for developers that CSP IT architects should note.

Facebook Places is similar to the recently successful ‘foursquare’ service, where users initiate a “check in” to a place, typically using their mobile device and internet data service. I see why this product design and user experience pattern is successful with downstream users.  First, it gives simple and private control to the user on when and what location is published. Second, it builds naturally off of user status updates and tweeting style of user-initiated updates. However, this user-initiated product design pattern does require sustained will and mindshare from the user to publish.

I personally would prefer a few folks to have my real-time location by default, with features to limit real-time location data to a trusted circle of people.  Continual GPS use zaps my device battery faster too.  I think of that always on (mostly to trusted people), real-time, network-initiated pattern as the “being in” places pattern, as opposed to the “checking in.”  Maybe I’m just a little lazy in that regard.  I still like check-in style too for my wider circle of acquaintances.

I still see a market need for mobile carrier network LBS products. But, CSPs need to get more aggressive in investing in the upstream market and exposing this network capability for free. Yes, I said “free”--at least for the next few years. Unless the magnetic polarity of the earth reverses sometime soon (a dark scenario for bigger reasons), device-based GPS is only going to get more and more adopted as a free alternative LBS source for apps to consume, instead of getting it from a cloud service like GSMA’s OneAPI LBS. So, I suggest CSPs give away this specific value of the network before the market forgets about "greedy" clouds. There are other enabling services CSPs can better monetize if they can get market and mind share with upstream developers and businesses.

On a more technical note, Facebook Places uses a new, even more simplified third-party developer API called “Graph API.” Graph API provides a very simple pattern for third-party developers and apps to read and write data between the Facebook platform.  The API uses username or object numeric identifiers in simple web addresses, depending on whether the object is a person, organization, or page of the person/org (username cases); or some other thing (number cases). So, every entity in the platform information model has a unique ID for hash functions. Many web service providers are diversifying away from relational information and data technologies towards semantic web and “NoSQL” approaches. Dynamic information relationships in less structured content, along with implementation performance and scale in cloud computing infrastructure, are two key reasons. These trends have me thinking about the TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) futures.