Shawn posts some interesting stuff on his Rabble service as it relates to location information. I think what he is learning is crucially relevant to what people ‘theorize’ about services that have a location component.
A few highlights from his post:
– An easy connection he made with someone, simply because of the intersection of being a Rabble user and being in the same town.
– How folks view a location as an excuse to connect (co-location) rather than a topic of conversation (location information). I like how he said it – ‘proximity browsing’.
Follow the link below.
Link: InterCasting Corp: Rabble Archives.
You might find this interesting: We have noticed that users of Rabble 1.0 don’t so much care about specific location. General location and proximity matter, but not specific location. Rabble enables a user to specify their location at different levels down to the Place level, so you could say “I am in San Diego” or “I am in La Jolla” or “I am at Harry’s Bar and Grill.” Then you can also define your proximity, which works like a physical search radius. Most Rabblers define their location at the city or neighborhood level. We thought there would be a user case where people would want to create Places and then blog about them, sort of like a user-generated city guide, but this has not happened. People don’t do it because there is really no reason to. Places simply aren’t strong enough nuclei around which to create any kind of community, conversation or even interest, as it would appear. Rabblers are very interested, however, to know who is around them, and we see a sort of proximity browsing a lot.
