One common method of doing geolocation does really constitute a universal ‘location-awareness’ layer as you put it: web apps can easily query an incoming IP for approximate coordinates, and do ‘ip delivery’ to enhance the user experience.

There’s an interesting divide, though, between apps where the location information is really useful and those where it’s merely an added interest. Take news, for example – there are several sites which scout up hyper-local news and blog posts, but they dont seem to be gaining lots of traction: I might not be interested to read about the pothole repair 2 blocks away, all that hyper-local focus can end up introducing noise, as news needs to be filtered by interest primarily.

Our site gruvr.com maps local concerts – it guesses where you are. This is more useful because live music is opportunistic – the question of just how far away a concert is does matter, since you’re trying to decide whether to actually GO there.

Regarding why geolocation hasnt been more widely adopted – There actually is a factor that those of us who are into geo-web apps know: you pay a severe penalty in terms of google SEO if you do geolocation.
Why? Because most google spiders geo-identify as a user from Sunnyvale or Mountain View CA!

Thus, the google and adsense spiders think your site is all about the San Franciso scene, and serve those local ads… even to people in Boston! Google can also penalize sites it thinks are doing cloaking, which is hard to tell from honest IP-delivery.

The end result is that such apps actually get penalized for improving user experience.
This is a sad state of affairs, an artifact of the text-based architecture of google’s search technology. It’s limiting a lot of what can be done on the web, simply because google wasn’t designed with knowledge of how geolocating apps often work.

It’s still a flat world, folks.

Great article, as always.

I would add that “location” is going to be closely linked with the evolution of “identity”, meaning the proliferation of multiple identities (pro – leisure – perso etc.) as these identities will have different degrees of “visibility” attached to them which is going to make things particularly complex to manage both on the user side and the application side.

This is starting to become a real “oignon”…

Andrew

http://www.vimeo.com/962626

I found value in this video since he talks about apps I was unaware of that are already using FE and he outlines his wish list for what he would like to see people do with it.

Excellent post Chris. And I woul add that once Android is pervasive, and Google enables AdSense inside it, use of the location layer with increase rapidly. Commerce has to have an fiscal incentive – AdSense ads contextually relevant down to the meter is it.

http://wherecamp.pbwiki.com/