6 Thoughts About Location Madness

DAM News Staff

15 years ago

Location based social networks – are you over it already? It feels like location is all we ever hear about anymore, especially this week leading up toSXSW.

We’re excited about location too; see our enthusiastic write-upsWhat Twitter’s Geolocation API Makes Possible andThe Era of Location as Platform Has Arrived. But it’s getting a little ridiculous. We offer below a few thoughts to consider about all this location madness.

That Phrase: “Location, Location, Location”
You’re going to hear journalists use it far too much. Want to know where it came from? Language sleuth William Safireinvestigated for the NYT last year and concluded that the phrase was probably first used in a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: “Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park.” Don’t you feel more savvy now?

Too Many Startups?

We’re under embargo on almost all of them, but we can tell you there are at least 25 companies making location-related announcements at SXSW this week. Probably more. The Dunbar number of startups in a particular market, if you will, is something like 5. More than that and most people stop taking new entrants seriously. It’s one thing to offer different technologies along the value chain of location, but sharing your location and aggregating messages by things like hashtag are two very crowded niches right now. One of my favorites isSitBy.Us, an app that lets you see where your Twitter friends are sitting in a conference session. That’s pretty cool.

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