Why is there so little interest in Bluetooth mobile social networking applications ?
Stumbling upon a months old article by my friend George’s blog expressing his idea of local social networking, I started thinking about Bluetooth again – I’m glad that he made that resurface.
Social networking has been in the air for about as long as Bluetooth exists. The fact that it can be used for reaching out to local people has not escaped obnoxious marketers nor have the frustrated Saudi youth taken long to innovate their way to sex in the midst of the hypocritical Mutaween.
Barely slower than the horny Saudi, SmallPlanet CrowdSurfer attempted to use Bluetooth to discover the proximity of friends, but it apparently did not survive: nowadays none of the likes of Brightkite, Gowalla, Foursquare or Loopt takes advantage of this technology – they all rely on the user checking-in manually. I automated the process for Brightkite – but still it is less efficient than local discovery and Bluetooth is not hampered by an indoor location.
People like George and me think about that from time to time, and researchers put some thought into it too – so it is all the more surprising that there are no mass-scale deployments taking advantage of it. I found OlderSibling but I doubt that it has a large user base and its assumed spying-oriented use-cases are quite off-putting. Georges mentioned Bliptrack, a system for the passive measurement of traffic, but it is not a social networking application. I registered with Aki-Aki but then found that it is only available on Apple Iphone – which I don’t use. I attempted registration with MobyLuck but I’m still waiting for their confirmation SMS… Both MobyLuck and Aki-Aki do not seem very insistent on increasing their user population.
Nevertheless I quite like the idea of MobyLuck and Aki-Aki and I wonder why they have not managed to produce any significant buzz – don’t people want local social networking ?
With indoor navigation looking like the next big thing already rising well above the horizon, I’m pretty sure that there will be a renewed interest in using Blueetooth for social networking – but why did it take so long ?
3 responses to “Why is there so little interest in Bluetooth mobile social networking applications ?”
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I work for OlderSibling, which you mentioned in your article and would like to clarify our goal. We are not interested spying or helping other people spy. We are just providing a tool that allows you to see where friends or family are.
For the most part, OlderSibling is primarily used to see when other users are home. I personally check to see when my husband got home, but not to spy on him or because I don’t trust him. Rather, it just helps me decide when to leave work. Plus he knows he can turn of his phone’s Bluetooth if for any reason he doesn’t want me to know that he’s there.
On a separate note, I’d like to mention one more interesting thing about Bluetooth. With the introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy chips later this year, I think we will see a rapidly growing number of products that have Bluetooth capability. This might help shake up the social media aspect of Bluetooth proximity.
Cheers,
Kelly
Thank you for the clarification. I’m sure you will gain from highlighting the friendly use-cases on your web site to prevent users such as me to get a wrong first impression.
Thanks for the feedback. We appreciate it.