Hey, Where Are You Guys?: The Problem With Location-Sharing Apps

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By: Andy Weiss

Ever try meeting up with a group of friends at a crowded music festival or sporting event? Finding Waldo is easier. Everyone around you is trying to locate his or her own friends. Or, better yet, they are posting pictures to Facebook, tweeting status updates, or checking the lineups or other scores. The cell phone networks are overloaded. If you can get a signal and reach a friend, it’s often impossible to hear the conversation. Then you need to repeat this process for everyone in the group all while they are doing the same to locate you. There has to be a better way. Enter group messaging and location-sharing apps.

At this past SXSW, several start-ups (GroupMe, Beluga, Kik, Fast Society, and Yobongo) tried to solve the one-to-many group communication challenge. Group messaging platforms were hot and Beluga was even gobbled up by Facebook. On the location-sharing side, Google Latitude and Glympse have been around for a while, but Apple just entered the fray with its Find My Friends app. Despite all the excitement and advances, a fundamental problem still exists. Each of the apps requires you to adopt a new and different behavior.

To understand why this is a problem, we need to back up a bit. When we operate in groups, we tend to gravitate to the lowest common denominator across the group as this facilitates communication. In our meet-up scenario, we have cell phone numbers for John, Chris, Scott, and Kevin that we use to call and text each one individually. If we want to reach them as a group, our natural inclination is to simply use our phones to conference everyone or send a broadcast text. Each of the group messaging and location-sharing apps attempts to interrupt this behavior and solve the problem in a different ways. But each adds a step to the process — a new phone number, a download, permission granting, decisions about group duration, etc. At least one person in our group must be aware of these alternatives, have the foresight to anticipate a communication problem and then coordinate communications across all or part of our group. That’s a bit of a tall order.

In the end, we do what we always do and eventually we meet up with our friends.