Space, time and community defines the future of mobile

A session about the future of mobile technology during the 2010 SXSWi festival brought together three people from social technology vendors to talk about the future of mobile. The refreshingly honest discussion remained neutral and touched on a number of points, including the state of location awareness and its usefulness.

Presenters

• Naveen Selvadurai, Foursquare
• Josh Babetski, MapQuest, Inc.
• Greg Cypes, AIM (AOL)

Pros and cons of location awareness

We are in the wild west. Questions about invasiveness are just now starting to surface. How different is someone following a blip on a screen compared to someone who tweets or updates their Facebook status? Not much. Someone could easily find out when you’re away from home and burglarize you by following your posts on Facebook or Twitter. The same argument stands in terms of following a blip on a screen.

Location awareness really benefit us on a whole by bringing relevance and focus to our lives. It becomes a game of who can be on top of the latest and greatest the fastest. Generally, you will only let your friends join your location based networks, so you are getting solid information from people you trust. Acquaintances are relegated to Facebook and Twitter; at least for late adopters of social technology. Teens are a bit more accepting to new tech and will be more trusting, so the trend for the future is moving to location based apps.

Your digital legacy

Privacy is what you make it. If you publish every little tidbit, you might have some issues when you kids come back to look in. If you are moderate, it could be a pleasant experience and actually quite fun. Nonetheless, the concept is mind-blowing as far as the sheer amount of content that you will be able to go through.

Is augmented reality working?

People love looking at lists. They also love maps. When you combine those into somekind of reality, people tend to shut down. The interfaces still have a long way to go. It’s easy to trip over a curb when you get sucked into Yelp, MapQuest or other augmented reality interfaces. It is actually quite dangerous. AR is a neat concept, but the human brain isn’t ready to embrace it fully at this point. 3D maps are impressive but not practical.

Serendipity versus algorithm

It’s not a question of either or, its a matter of how they work together. People trust what their friends say about a bar or a restaurant. Algorithms can’t make these kind of calculations. No matter how advanced we get, we will never be able to replace human trust. Together, these two components will work hand in hand to give us the best results.