Trend in Location Bases Social Networks

It is Mass Comm week at Texas State University and I was fortunate to make it to the Trend in Location Based Social networking presentation. Already being a user of Gowalla and Facebook my eyebrows were up to here in the future of the technology. Aaron Strout orchestrated this event and interviewed Johnothan Carroll from Gowalla, Simon Salt from Incslinger, Tony Avila Granados from One Taco.

I always have been a fan of Gowalla because of their creative imagery and friends with Josh William the CEO. This company seems to want to be a different location based network by having fun and bringing others together with a common interest. During the session I was highly amused with John’s new venture for Gowalla. They are going to bring music to their forefront to help with concerts for local bands to big bands. He gave us some ideas of this new venture. One of his ideas was to make check-in spots that you can send three pictures of the concert and you could receive a limited mp3 song from the band as a free gift. Making this interactive experience on Gowalla will help promote the band and reward the Gowalla user.

Simon Salt was a very interesting man. He currently is writing a book on location based trends and has tried out dozens of the top location based API’s. During his speech he said the best location based app he has found was Yelp. He said, that the GPS works the best and has the most inventive and useful applications for people. I downloaded it quickly on my Iphone when I saw the monocle option. This new option uses your camera and GPS to find locations. It is like having ex-ray vision on your phone. One other interesting thing that I recollect is that Simmon sees trends in certain location-based companies, which I thought was very interesting. He said Gowalla will attract more women do to the easy going feel and graphic based set up. Foursquare would appeal more to men because it is more masculine by wanting to dominate through competition.

The third presenter Tony Avila Granados was very interesting, because he was not into location based social networking about two years ago. He shared his testimony on how he was starting up his business OneTaco. He proved that location based social networking has quadrupled his business. By using Gowalla and volunteering his business to put out 1,000 tacos to all different locations he found people all over the world looking for his small business in Austin, Texas.

Mass Communication week was great at Texas State University and I would recommend it to all. If you have not checked out location-based networking you should give it a try. Almost all API’s are free.