The Cycle Repeats
In the past few years pretty much all communications could be geotagged in one way or another.
E-mails could be geotagged, social networking apps could share location and soon, with a new API from Twitter, individual tweets will be geotagged. Each time the press repeats the cycle: this is bad, people can stalk you, will rob you when they know you are not home, people will “fake their location”...
Yes, that’s all true and has been true with every implementation before this one. How, really, are geotagged tweets any different from what’s come before? Is Twitter that much more important or real time or whatever that the impact will be different? Nextweb seems to think this is the first time any messages were geotagged in its Six Reasons why Twitter Geolocation is a really, really bad idea (do note the TWO “reallys”).
If you feel the need to play in this world of sharing location, I encourage you to do so. But, look first at tools to manage that sharing beyond the apps themselves. Consider Fire Eagle (which I’ve gone on about before) and even new “limited time based” sharing services like Glympse (Fire Eagle folks - can you add that?)
