In an IEEE article called "Location-Based Services: Back to the Future", Paolo Bellavista, Axel Küpper, and Sumi Helal gives an interesting overview of the technical issues regarding location-based services. They take an intriguing viewpoint: projecting themselves in 2012 and backasting to discuss “What Was Wrong with First-Generation Location-Based Services?” (i.e. LBS of today). Starting with a brief history of how LBS evolved from Enhance 911 in the US to the explosion of projects which started around 2005. They then discuss this evolution of time, giving some hints about what they think the 2008-2012 axis can be:
The evolution they envision is made of 4 major changes:
"From reactive to proactive: Proactive LBSs, instead, are automatically initiated when a predefined event occurs—for example, if the user or a target (another designated person) approaches or leaves a certain point of interest or another target. Proactive LBSs demand much less user attention and interaction. (...) From self- to cross-referencing: Self-referencing LBSs are services in which the user and target coincide, while cross-referencing LBSs exploit the target location for service-provisioning of another user, thus requiring stronger privacy protection. (...) From single- to multitarget (the number of targets participating in an LBS session): In multitarget LBSs, the focus is more on interrelating the positions of several targets among each other. (...) From content-to application-oriented: the delivery of such dynamic applications is impromptu. In contrast to content-oriented LBSs, application-oriented LBSs provide a more powerful and richer interaction model, with autonomic installation and removal of dynamically needed components."
Why do I blog this? although I don't necessarily agree with all the points here, the articles gives an overview of the technical issues regarding LBS lately. Another comment I had after reading the paper is that all of this looks very cryptic from a UX POV.