It was interesting to see the details of the much anticipated release of Twitter Places this week. It's another simple use of location in an ever growing awareness of Location Intelligence in ways that are similar to what Google Earth and Microsoft Bing did a few years ago. It has fascinating long term implications = you can now know the location context of where a tweet is coming from. The example Twitter uses in their announcement (is the tweet about the World Cup coming from inside the stadium or in front of a TV?) points out that the value of the location context can be significant.
What does that mean on an enterprise business level? Well in the enterprise usage of location the precise attributes of the information are always far more critical than in social networks. In recent posts we have talked about the need in the insurance vertical to know exact information about a specific property. As those needs get fulfilled (and they will) the quality of the information becomes even more important. Therefore information obtained while at the property site would have extra value (versus utilizing satellite or outdated government sources for example). What Twitter Places does in the social network game is essentially adding a similar context value. If I'm actually "there", my location and its associated information has special value. It's not surprising to see another example of how social/consumer use and enterprise use are slowing getting closer. As these types of examples grow, what will also become very apparent is that the combination of many sources of data (some real time, some from expert sources, some from trend sources) will become big time business, especially as the need for accuracy is paramount in the enterprise world. Visit our blog next week as we discuss how Twitter Places really represents the concept of "big data", and how that concept is translating into Location Intelligence for Communications Service Providers.
No comments:
Post a Comment