Maybe it was two weeks without checking in anywhere, but I'm pretty ok letting Foursquare go for now. I had friends on it, and it was kind of fun getting mayorships and badges. But it just never really solidified the way other social networks have for me (twitter and facebook mainly).
I was pretty religious about checking in for about the last 10 months, but the benefits weren't outweighing the downside. What downside? Always pulling out my phone whenever I went into a coffee shop or restaurant, for one. I'm consciously trying to reduce the number of times in a day I pull out my phone. (I rather like the tweet by @scottsimpson: "My new standard of cool: when I'm hanging out with you I never see your phone ever ever ever.")
I still am very interested in location-based apps. But the ones I want don't exist yet. Because really, it's more than an app itself, the phone needs to be more location aware.
The Ideal Location-Based Phone
I want one that allows me to draw a box around, let's say the Galaxy Theater, and the phone will know that when I'm inside the theater that the phone should be silenced and text messages don't buzz me. (this kind of thing is called Geo-Fencing). Or maybe it would know to only take calls from my "favorites list" and send the rest directly to voicemail.
I want one that will let me place pins on a map of places I'd like to visit, and then ping me if I ever get within a certain distance of them. Think how great that would be while you're traveling in a new city! Walking aimlessly around New York and suddenly your phone buzzes: "You're 2 blocks away from that restaurant you've always wanted to visit!" Handy.
The phone could give me a daily report of my activity: minutes walking versus minutes driving, for example. This wouldn't be too hard to figure out based on speed and location (even if I'm going 3 mph, I'm probably not walking on I-5, etc) and the data would be cool to have.
If it could tell when I'm driving, that would actually be a safety feature. If I'm driving, it would automatically load voice-control for dialing. Or maybe Dragon Dictation would load as automatically to reply to text messages, etc.
I want one with an easier "check in". If the app recognized that I'd been in the same general vicinity for the last minute, perhaps it could automatically guess where I was, and shorten the check-in process.
Maybe it could even give suggestions based on other people's activity. "Over the last three nights, 1022 South has increased in popularity 50%. Worth checking out?" Or "We've seen fewer checkins at Old Milwaukee Cafe this week. Might be easier to get a table." Or "Something big is going on at Wright Park."
In theory, Four Square has a lot of this data already. And it could probably send it out without violating anyone's individual privacy.
But even so, the iPhone can't do a lot of this right now. It would have to allow for a regular GPS check every minute at least, if not more regularly. So instead of an app checking for coordinates, the phone would do it and alert all my apps that use that data. That would likely drain the battery, so we won't see these kinds of features until battery quality continues to improve.
Note, some android phones are much more location aware than the iPhone, so I could switch and get a lot of this. But I want Apple to go there. If the iPhone 5 were centered around this location-awareness, it would be a huge leap forward.
I enjoyed this post. I have just a few comments.
“I want one that allows me to draw a box around, let’s say the Galaxy Theater, and the phone will know that when I’m inside the theater that the phone should be silenced and text messages don’t buzz me.” This is an Android phone with Locale.
“The phone could give me a daily report of my activity: minutes walking versus minutes driving, for example.” Sportstracklive on Android lets you track high exertion activities, like running or biking, including heart rate but I don’t know of anything that does specifically what you are talking about. I’m sure with a combination of accelerometer data and GPS we could create something better than the Fitbit but I’m not sure we will like what it does to battery life.
“I want one with an easier “check in”. If the app recognized that I’d been in the same general vicinity for the last minute, perhaps it could automatically guess where I was, and shorten the check-in process.” With the foursquare API we could do this. Your false positive rate might be unacceptable depending upon your habits and travel corridors.
“Maybe it could even give suggestions based on other people’s activity.” Ratio Finder (http://www.weeplaces.com/ratiofinder/) is a start but we need to broaden the use cases. I don’t want to do this because Foursquare will just come destroy us as soon as we prove the business case.
I think the one point I would really like to make is that we all should turn our backs on the iPhone walled garden and pay more attention to what open APIs and open mobile platforms are making possible. The iPhone is a problem not so much because of any specific technical limitation or the app store acceptance policy in specific. It is a problem because it makes people believe innovation comes only from the one true source, Apple.
Appreciate the comments, Andrew. I agree, a lot of this is already done by certain Android phones. It’s one of the biggest areas the iPhone lags behind. Introducing the ability to ping the GPS location every … 15 seconds let’s say, and give the hooks for any application I choose to store that data, would allow the iPhone apps to do a lot of these things. So the innovation doesn’t come from Apple, just the basic framework. What to do with the data is where the innovation comes in, and that’s the app developers.