Will we become more spontaneous?
by asi
Yesterday I finally got the time to read Faris’s futuristic article on Campaign. It’s ace. I really can’t wait for the web to be delivered directly into my occipital lobe…
But before we all turn into cyberborgs there is a pinch of skepticism I’d like to share with you regarding location aware applications. It’s not fully elaborated so bear with me and please add your thoughts (I will talk only on ‘places to find’ in this post – two more coming soon)
Everyone is really excited about the opportunities of contextual-aware applications, or geotility as we call it now (cause we love buzzwords oh so much). It’s rooted in the idea that your mobile can now make things useful for where you are. As Faris says, the basic element of this has been mapped out: you never get lost.
So far so good. But when I read between the lines of stories about the future of location-based apps and even more location/cotext-based advertising I can’t avoid feeling the hyperbole. Following Johana’s great article I will start with the the promise of finding places.
This is perhaps the most straightforward promise of location-aware apps but there is, to my view a somewhat misleading assumption as to the amount of information that people need/want when they are out and about. There might be indeed few lucky ones that are roaming freely in new places looking for new stuff to do. The majority of us are spending most days in the office and when we go out and about, we normally make plans.
The point I’m trying to make is that the promise of location-aware applications is based on a perception of a much more spontaneous, adventurous, time-rich human being and personally I don’t know too many of them. When it comes to where to eat, where to drink, where to go, what to see and where to shop, our existing behaviour is far more task-oriented, planned and calculated.
This is true even in the case of a holiday – you’re off to a city break where you haven’t been before. Surely you won’t wait to be in the middle of town-center waiting for some ideas from your mobile? well, maybe some will but most won’t.
Let’s take for example one of my favourite iphone apps – the awesomesque urbanspoon:
While I checked couple of new restaurants with this app, it was never spontaneously, in real time. It was at home or the office when I knew I’m going out tonight/tomorrow and fancied a recommendation of a new restaurant. So urbanspoon is a lovely gimmick and fun to use but I bet most people use it for fun, at home, rather than spontaneously in real time. I don’t know…. I might be completely wrong.
What do you think?
Next: find your friends and lacation-aware advertising
Great post Asi and great timing for us at Unchained.
Here’s my two bits. The thing that bugs me most about tech trends is the same thing that bugs me about marketing as a whole: the minute you put a bunch of people in a room to brainstorm the next big thing amongst consumers they completely forget what real people are like. And they expect real people to care as much as they do.
We’re exploring mobile, geotaggy doodahs for Unchained at the moment. The most crucial element for us is the user’s mindset and when they’ll feel inclined to use our app. We think it’s when they go ‘shit, I should have checked Unchained yesterday, I’m sure there was a great place in this neighbourhood’. The crucial bit here is that they have a relationships with our site first and the app complements this relationship. Expecting it to work the other way around is a big ask. Especially with mobile tech users still being a relatively teeny group of folk. It makes me wonder how much of it is about the band wagon and not so much about content strategy.
chicken and egg my friend. The behaviour can’t arise without the technology to satisfy it. And the technology has no relevance unless people are using it.
We’re in the clunky chasm between yesterday and tomorrow. It’s a gap filled happily by the promises you mention.
The tipping point (presumably marked by longitude and latitude) will come and we will learn to alter our behaviour accordingly – in the same way we learned to hold back from organising where to meet a friend once we had mobile phones that allowed spontaneous changes.
please don’t do that quotation marks thingy on me! Nothing I say means anything
Live and direct from your neocortex~
Hello mate. I agree with you. But I think there will a] be stages – i.e. things that make what you already do easier faster better more.
And then later things that require new behaviours.
But – let’s think about mobiles. And texts. So – before you had a phone, you made plans like
I will meet you at 8pm at this pub.
And now you say
I’ll call you when I get somewhere.
Much more spontaneous. But it takes a while to allow fluidity.
Andy hits it – all technology changes behaviour – how much time did we spend with computers before the web – it jsut takes time to become invisible
My dear friends….kissing you straight on your amigdala
Andy – as usual mate, you articulate the problem far more poetically as I can ever do and you are spot on. Thats why the title of the post was left as an open question
But….(it’s a bit like comparing NIKE+ and Fiat Eco-Drive)
Has texting made us more spontaneous or has it just eliminate the necessity to be precise about time/place we meet with our mates?
I can see a situation where you set up to meet a friends at Soho for example without taking a decision on where to eat/drink. You meet up and look at your fire-eagle to receive an idea for a pub or a restaurant you’ve never been before.
But that actually means you pushed the ‘planning’ phase into the actual meeting – what does that mean?
What will/could happen when we all have a customised, real-time digital version of TIMEOUT in the palm of our hands?
That brings me to Lea’s point – in the first behavioural phase there needs to be a relationship first that the location-aware service will complement.
Hailz to the futurz!!!
For me it’s simply about options.
Being able to text didn’t automatically make me more spontaneously-minded. It was more practical than that. It gave me the option to postpone my decisions. This option was previously unavailable to me. I would have simply missed the person I was meeting.
however, the option to postpone deciding a meeting place was incredibly clear to both parties: we both have phones and we can have this conversation later.
the services you’re talking about are more novel, slightly abstract and unevenly distributed, so the cross-over will be less simple.
If you dig deeper, I suppose it’s about postponing decisions and commitments until the optimum moment. I.e. If I pick a restaurant before I’m hungry it might not be the choice I’d make later at the time of eating. But I don’t think “the optimum moment” is how we consciously think about it.
The more opportunities we have to make decisions this way the less pre-determined our actions will be, surely? It’s all a matter of time, hardware, software, distribution, ease of use *cough*..
God what a ramble. I’m going to go and drink beer.
I’ll twitter you when I decide where I’m going
Hey Asi, thanks for the link and nice to meet you.
I haven’t read the other comments yet, but one of the factors this might depend on is the location the people with such apps are in. It might be much harder to find use for the spontaneity required to use the location-based services in a town like Atlanta or Richmond, where a bit of driving is required and things aren’t as varied and squished together in close proximity as in a condensed city. I end up with the “I’m in X neighborhood, where can I find a bathroom /coffee shop /drug store” situation frequently in NY, where this would come in handy; probably because it would be convenient and easy to find such places here.
[...] The best one i’ve seen to date is urbanspoon and that’s only because of the playful interface (see my post). [...]