Social Networking Driving LBS Adoption, Says ABI

November 7, 2008

While many location-based services (LBS) applications are adding or plan to add 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, says ABI Research.

The market research firm concludes that mobile location-based social networking will become a key driver for the uptake of LBS as it provides a unifying framework for a large set of applications such as friend finders, local search, and geotagging.

"While growth will be mainly driven by the availability of multimedia-centric GPS handsets, other mobile form factors will also become important," said Dominique Bonte, ABI research director. "Mobile Internet devices with built-in GPS receivers have been announced, with location-based social networking site GyPSii supporting Moblin-based Intel Atom processor-powered MIDs. Connected portable navigation devices and outdoor GPS solutions are other obvious candidates for location-based networking. Nissan Carwings' in-car telematics solution allows the sharing and ranking of fuel consumption in Japan."

Licensing agreements with carriers and handsets manufacturers will be a crucial success factor for location-enabled social sites to reach critical market share, ABI said. While initially a wide range of business models will coexist, ultimately advertising-based models will prevail because of the perfect fit with the local search- and content-driven social context, according to the market research firm. Another important trend is the emergence of location-enabled instant messaging with applications such as Palringo Local and Nokia Chat enriching mobile communication with location context.

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