Mobile Search, Wayfinding and Matchmaking

Posted: December 14th, 2005 | 1 Comment »

Many LBS scenarios deal with mobile search, wayfinding, and converting strangers into friends. They have that in common that they are pretty useless in areas known by the users (home, office and many third places). We do not necessarily need assistance to find out everyday stuff (the closest post office from my home?), how to navigate in these areas, and in artificially making acquaintances. This leaves these mobile LBS being sparsely relevant to unknown areas.

2 posts talked about it lately:
Wayfinding, GPS and social navigation by Nicolas quoting Jan in future perfect.

“Mobile with GPS and map application. So you want to make a map reference in a hurry? “It’s easier to just ask someone” In many instances so it is“.

Is Mobile Search About Local? by Russell in Mobhappy:

Most people actually know the area they live and work in pretty well and don’t need our assistance to find out everyday stuff like this.

Russel also talks about the Need to Know Now Factor (N2KN) being often not really relevant to location and mobility:

The N2KN factor may indeed have a local element to it from time to time, but Local won’t be the factor that actually stimulates the Search. In the short to medium term, when mobiles are so much slower and clumsier to use than computers (or even Yellow Pages), being motivated to use mobile search is going to depend on how urgently you need the information and how important it is.

One Comment on “Mobile Search, Wayfinding and Matchmaking”

  1. 1 Mauro said at 12:42 pm on December 15th, 2005:

    I agree, altough I would add that the power of LBSes should be exploited in two different directions:

    1- collaborative information building
    2- fined-grain local information access

    The former refer to the fact that LBSs for social navigation are in essence a comunication tool, so they should not be considered from the single-user perspective.

    The latter says that the information that make sense in such systems is something you should not find elsewhere (i.e., I did not know that there was an atomic reactor at EPFL since I red a post on ShoutSpace).