urbaner anti-eskapismus!

Someone asked what I meant by this random fire. This post embellishes it a bit more.

There are three new mobile location data gatekeepers emerging; Social Location Aggregators, Network Location Aggregators, and others with their own hardware/software/services/content stack

Social Location Aggregators

Facebook and Twitter. ...These players are leveraging a rich ecosystem of smartphone publishing clients with capabilities to push location data up to their larger platforms where it's now made Web-available to other developers and their applications. There's a healthy ecosystem of publisher-contributors and developer-consumers, but power is emerging in the middle. I suspect these middlemen gatekeepers will stay open, but beware... they have the keys and can lock the front and back doors at anytime.

Network Location Aggregators

Alcatel-Lucent, LOC-AID, Neustar, Technocom, ULocate, Useful-Networks, Wavemarket.  ...Call these players the new gatekeepers of yesterdays wireless carrier gatekeepers. They use the wireless network to pull down mobile location data (by phone number) and then run their own privacy protection authorization and authentication management on web services they expose to developers. Many years ago, similar approaches released SMS from individual carrier stovepipes and subsequently fueled explosive growth for messaging. Network location aggregators hope the same happens for cross-carrier location data. All US carriers are finally aboard which should support a healthy ecosystem, but beware... these middlemen have the keys, have competing applications of their own, and they too can lock the front door at anytime. 

Others who have their own hardware/software/services/content stack

Apple and Google. They each have their own location-ready devices, positioning databases, mobile OSs, applications, services, and content (including the geo variety). It's their party; we're all just guests. Tread carefully. Doing something that threatens their core focus could get you expelled. ...They also have the keys and can lock the front door at anytime.