Month: November 2007

Google LBS Services

After reading comments and looking at the overall architecture view of the framework, I decided to investigate the android.location API a little more closely. The first item is interesting because it would allow you to conserve battery life and, I assume, toggle between (free) GPS positionning and perhaps (not so free) cell-tower triangulation. The second item is where the interesting stuff can happen. Imagine an application that knows the location of all your friends and the location of their favorite spots along with the permission associated to all those locations. When you are moving around the mobile application on the device could register some intents (by obtaining specific lat/long information from a dedicated server) to alert you of interesting places but also of nearby friends.

Brand Networking

But think about it: You’re on one of those social sites, already being social with your friends, and so why are you going to follow a link and click to a cookie site to tell you how to be social? You’re not. And so the cookie company is, I predict, going to flop at its cookie site (once today’s rush of Times traffic subsides) and then it will declare that social doesn’t work and isn’t worth anything and it will return to buying upfront TV.

in case you needed more arguments that social network “brand advertising” is an idea only dumb people on madison avenue could have.