Location 2012
Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that:
- users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone – this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy
- carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web – they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives
- device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so – why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?
Nevertheless, this is the most complete description of the future that I’ve seen to date, and is worth a read.