Social Mapping Comes to Sprint

On Tuesday, Sprint released plans to provide “social mapping” services for its cell phone customers, through a company called Loopt.

Social mapping, as a budding phenomenon, is starting to generate significant buzz in the wireless industry. The Sprint service allows users to automatically share their location (together with a status message), send proximity-based messages, and view “geo-tagged content” directly from a cell phone.

In essence, your Loopt-enabled friends will be able to track your location, making rendezvous (and progress updates, for the friend who’s always late) that much easier to coordinate. The status message option also allows you to distinguish between “stuck at the office” and “happy hour – come on down!” And, going beyond planned encounters, Loopt likes to say it “increases serendipity” by letting you know when your friends happen to pass nearby, thereby facilitating chance meetings.

It should be noted that the service allows users to control who has access to the info, and you can “hide yourself” at any time – the privacy concerns swirling around this kind of technology are, at this early stage, hyperbolic.

The “geo-tagged content” element of Loopt is another innovation worth keeping tabs on. The convenience of quickly finding content tailored specifically for your neighborhood is an exciting thought - one that advertisers are well aware of. Hyperlocal content is in its early evolutionary stages right now, but seems certain to be augmented by mobile-hyperlocal content. The advertising community awaits the arrival of a viable business model.

In the meantime, “social mapping” is coming soon to the Sprint network; it’s compatible with 25 GPS-enabled Sprint cell phones, and will be available for a $2.99 monthly fee.