Turn off your phones! Geotags are coming!

Siemens is working on a new system for geo-annotating physical space. The details sound identical to most implementations that have ever been proposed, whereby a mobile user can tag a place with a message and people walking by will receive the message. The scary aspect is the glossing-over given to the complex subject of filtering and spam. To PCWorld a Siemens spokesperson says, "...there will be ways to accept and reject messages." The Siemens press release (PDF) itself says:

Advertising messages could be placed in front of stores to draw attention to special offers. Anyone in the mood for shopping could switch on the advertising mode and wander from one offer to the next. People in a hurry simply switch this mode off.

I know this is just one company trying one experiment in a walled garden, but it does show the need for a wider debate about the pitfalls of location-based information. If the user experience -- and societal experience, since this is the public sphere -- is left as an afterthought to the raw potential of the technology, then people in a hurry won't be the only ones switching this off. To succeed (mentioned before but worth repeating) the user's interface to such a system needs to be more than binary--not just 'receive mode' or 'not receive mode'. There should be an easy way to highlight messages from a user's social network and then subjects of interest. Location-based advertising will succeed only if the content is customized, compelling, easily navigable, not overwhelming, and, most importantly, opt-in. Any implementation less than this would kill a promising new social, gaming, and communication medium before it ever gets off the ground.

Comments

[Paul Golding]

This is symptomatic of the general approach of mobile operators and vendors. They generally only participate in technology forums and deliver technology. In this instance we really need a forum to discuss mobile advertising and to generate an application- or user-centred view, rather than a techno-centric view. In other words, how would users like to be advertised to, rather than how can we deliver the ads.