Geosocial networking
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Web-based social networks assemble and organize communities of people who share interests and activities, or who seek to explore the interests and activities of others.
An online social network service provides multiple tools allowing users to identify common interests and interact. These include chat, messaging, email, video, voice communication, file sharing, blogging, discussion groups, and others. Conventional social networking services such as MySpace, Facebook and Orkut allow users to create personal profiles. Participants upload photographs and biographical information and can often network as "friends" with other users. Social networks typically implement privacy controls that allow users to choose who can view their profiles or initiate contact.
GeoSocial networking services are thematic social networks organized around place-based content. These utilize the growing array of free or inexpensive map services delivered over the Internet to allow users to accurately place and share information pertaining to highly accurate geospatial feature locations. By 2007, the most prominent examples of these services were evolving in areas of business reviews (primarily restaurants and bars) and real estate. Significant among these are yelp and trulia.
Photosharing sites that feature geotagging and commentary (ie, Flickr, Panoramio) arguably qualify as minimal geosocial networking services. The same holds for video sharing services, such as Youtube which extended its upload/tagging capabilities in July 2007 to encourage geotagging.
Wikimapia is a thematically undifferentiated geosocial network that provides input and commentary around local features of any type. Emerging services such as Fatdoor (in private alpha mode since May 2007 in Silicon Valley) purport to be pure local-centric geosocial platforms.
Many of these services are integrated with Google Earth or may be ingested by other geographic display and query software, though feature and attribute editing is typically restricted to the hosted environments.
Because online geosocial networking sites target locally familiar content, participation tends inherently to encourage face to face interaction of users in or around local places.
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[edit] Applications
GPS Messenger is an application for BlackBerry and Windows Mobile smartphones that allows users to share instantaneously their GPS position, status and free comments with any email recipient. It can be used on a manual or beacon (breadcrumb trail) modes.
The recipient gets an email with a secure hyperlink which opens automatically the user’ GPS position and message on a customized Google Maps interface.
This cross-carrier application works in any country with BlackBerry/GPRS service. It respects privacy of the users as all the data is encrypted.
GPS Messenger is developed by Crisis Consulting [1]
Locle [2] is an application for Java Mobile, Symbian S60 and S80, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones that allows users to share their location using either GPS or cell-tower. The application integrates into Facebook and other social networking websites with open APIs (application programming interfaces). Locle is developed by Leprecian, Ltd., who also own GSM-Tracker [3], a cell-tower semantic tagging community website.
