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Geo-tagged marketing: The location equation

December 15, 2009 |

Location-based services are changing mobile, as industry heavyweights like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are racing to map out a digital, geo-tagged future where our physical and virtual worlds will increasingly collide.

Everyone, it seems, is looking to take advantage of the demand for location-based services created by GPS-enabled devices, such as Apple's iPhone and Google's Android 2.0. Even desktop operating systems, such as Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard will soon contain location-awareness features -- so too will browsers, as we've seen with the latest Firefox releases.

Now come the services. Just this week, Google launched What's Nearby, a location-based search that's part of Google Maps on Android and will soon be more widely available. The service allows consumers to simply access a list of the ten closest places of interest near their physical location via their mobiles.

And that's just to start: Google Latitude allows users to share their locations with friends and view their friends activities on a map; Facebook has rewritten its privacy policy, foreshadowing its entrance into location-based services; and Twitter has rolled out its Geotagging API, which will allow popular Twitter apps like Tweetie and Tweetdeck to display the location from where a tweet was posted.

Get the full story at AdvertisingAge

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