A Location Based Service With Discretion

Face2face is a new entrant to the growing location-based service category, billing itself as “the discreet way to let your friends know when you’re nearby.” Some of the key differentiating characteristics we culled from MIT’s Technology Review include:

• Rather than simply share location information, the service aims to incorporate users’ location into a more useful and seamless application
• Aims to show that proximity data can be useful whenever a person is out and about, not just at a special event (i.e., who else is there when you check into Trader Joe’s)
• Lets users tap into their connections on Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter, and see if any of those connections are nearby
• Face2face will only notify users when a contact is nearby, and it does not give out that contact’s exact location
• Aims to avoid oversharing by looking only at what’s within walking distance, and only letting you know who’s nearby (vs. where all your contacts are)
• Privacy settings let users decide if they want to be invisible to others, and who they want to share their information with.
• Once users know they’re near each other, the application lets them communicate by text, phone, or messages on a social networking site
• Aims to ultimately make advertising more relevant; for example, in the future, instead of simply offering coupons to nearby coffee shops, the app may offer coupons to a coffee shop where a friend is already sitting
• Brand implications: may extend the reach of location-based advertising by allowing brands to target content and offers to users based on their social context (i.e., hear what The Most Interesting Man in the World did at the bar you’re at)

[via Technology Review]