For Now, Most Americans Happy to Be Un-Located [Privacy]

Will most folk ever really aspire to be mayor? The excitement surrounding location services is massively disproportionate to their actual use, says the NY Times -just one% of american citizens use them weekly. But will it remain a yuppie novelty?

According the National Venture Capital Association, $115 million has been injected into location-based services up to now year. That’s a nice section of change. Services like Foursquare, Facebook’s new darling Places , and Loopt have captured quite a few national attention, but were received narrowly-80% of users are men, and 70% are between 19 and 35. But is that a difficulty? Not in the event you’re an advertiser seeking to get in on the positioning-aware action (like Starbucks and Gap), who covet the eyeballs of that top demographic. But in case you’re backing this kind of services, you’re probably hoping for attention beyond urban geeks including myself.

And it appears like most Americans simply don’t care. Having an internet presence tends to breed bloated vanity, but everyone is staying humble: ” We go to playtime, the park and the grocery store. My life isn’t exciting enough to broadcast where I am and what I do,” says one woman who spoke to the Times. ” I will’t contemplate anybody who cares where I am every minute of the day except my wife, and he or she already knows,” says another-a 65 year old freelance writer. ” Maybe it’s a generational thing. As we old fogies die off, maybe this will likely not be a question.”

The great generational die-off probably the proper shot these companies have: ” The magic age is people born after 1981,” says a Loopt exec. ” That’s the cut-off for us where we see a huge change in privacy settings and user acceptance.” Or Facebook, whose Places is hailed by many location evangelists as the last push with the intention to knock us all onto the social radar. On the other hand, being a male between the ages of 19 and 35, only six of my friends have checked in on Places previously week. And I don’t care about any of them. [ NY Times ]
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This post is tagged: americans, now, Privacy, UnLocated