ABI: GPS-Enabled Social Networking to Skyrocket

According to ABI Research, mobile social networking is expected to drive location-based service growth, since it enables applications such as friend finders, local search and geo-tagging.

“While many LBS applications will include features allowing the sharing of real-time experiences via fixed social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, fully-fledged mobile location-based social networking sites will also gain momentum with more than 82 million subscriptions expected by 2013,” the report said.

The problem that we see is that many of these services are walled gardens, requiring logins and requiring friends to all be a part of the same service for it to be of much value. There’s no denying the usefulness of location-based services, though, especially now that many phones come with built-in GPS chips (which Verizon then goes and disables, but that’s besides the point).

(Image credit: Loopt.com)

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.