Location, Location, Location: Even on the Internet, It's All That Matters

Twitter and Foursquare are joining forces to allow you to more precisely tell the world where you are Tweeting from. It's an obvious idea. And it inches along a mashup I'm surprised hasn't advanced more rapidly. Geo-location is a core feature of smartphones. It's not just a matter of placing yourself on a map but knowing important things about your surroundings, and — this is the really cool part — having them know about you.

Three years ago in a Reuters column, I wrote longingly of a possible future where point-of-sale payment and even customer experience were enabled and enhanced by presence awareness, which the proliferation of smartphones made possible. I found the prospect of VIP treatment for the masses intoxicating, and this mass democratization suddenly within reach.

I imagined a world where much of the inconvenience and pain associated with bricks-and-mortar shopping could be wiped away in one fell swoop, giving retailers a powerful, new weapon in their battle with online shopping — personal service. I smiled at the poetic justice that digital, which had done so much to cripple real-world stores, was coming to the rescue.

It was happening, and we were ready.

Or, not.

When I got all excited back then, the context was narrow: A race I thought was going on between NFC payments and a novel, now-defunct alternate by Square to use presence awareness to not only smooth a transaction but improve the entire experience. I thought it would take over the world.

GPS mobile payments are at the opposite end of the conceptual spectrum from NFC, and therein lies their power. NFC is specifically designed to work only over tiny distances – a few centimeters – the better to avoid mishaps that might occur if you were just walking past a terminal. But that means the consumer is invisible to the retailer until she’s paying for something. GPS, on the other hand, can alert consumers to nearby establishments’ special offers, and alert establishments when returning customers are on the premises. That creates untold opportunities to cultivate customers, not just take their money.

Imagine being addressed by name as you’re seeking help in a store. Or of having your transactional (or any other) history accessed by someone trying to help you without any other authentication except you standing there (and, of course, giving your permission). The happy experience could begin well before you arrive, as I mused while I praised Pay with Square:

Stores can display specials offers, a menu, contact information and even offer pre-ordering, all within the app, which then “pays” when you’ve picked up your purchase. It’s a mashup of Yelp and Foursquare and Google Local, with the added ease of a borderline non-existent checkout process.

You'd never have to endure a Starbucks cashier mangling your name. Even at tavern where nobody knows your name the bartender could knowingly say "The usual?" as she slides a coaster your way.

That's pretty mundane stuff that has been possible for a while now. So why are we closer to something as exotic as self-driving cars than something this simple?

My guess is that there is a disconnect between some technological leaps and the appreciation of immediate usefulness. Sometimes, like video chats, it's because most people think of it as definitely not useful (I have to comb my hair and look interested to talk to someone on the phone!?). It took a new generation that is naturally comfortable with being on display to make Skyping a so-what experience.

The adoption of contactless payments, at least in the US, has also been slow. When I first wrote about it five years ago I declared that "Google’s full-throttled entry into the mobile payments space last week removed any doubt that this is the make-or-break year for the digital wallet." Ahem.

Apple Pay has received lots of attention, and Apple CEO Tim Cook recently disclosed that the number of locations accepting more than tripled in six months to 700,000. But a recent study found that 85% of iPhone 6 users have never tried it. It's 2011 all over again ...

Geo-location differs from these two advancements in at least one important respect: It requires little to no "work" on the part of the user. Pay with Square's chicken-and-egg-problem might be illuminating: Very few vendors signed on, and one which had, an establishment where I repeatedly tried to use it, couldn't get it to function. No other customer ever asked the proprietor about it.

It wasn't only Square trying to nudge the consumer into the future. As Bernard Marr writes on LinkedIn, some retailers flirted with "beacons" a few years ago. "[I]t wasn’t that uncommon ... to receive a message via Bluetooth containing advertising for a nearby store (probably one selling mobile phones)," Marr notes. "The idea never really caught on – it seemed somewhat intrusive to have a store announce its presence to you on approach – and the format was very limited – generally just a short text message."

Beacons are coming back, Marr says, though he's only confident enough to think he'll be right "eventually." Business Insider is more bullish: It predicts that "beacons (will) directly influence over $4 billion worth of US retail sales this year at top retailers" and 10 times that in 2016. Facebook got into the act with "Place Tips," a pilot program limited to New York. Apple installed 1,000 iBeacons at this year's SXSW, but the big story was Meerkat.

My experience was with Square, but the all-round problem with presence awareness has clearly been demand: Nobody is clamoring for it, not enough people get excited hearing about it and then just have to have it, not enough people think of it as being immediately useful instead of intrusive. It doesn't help that early incarnations were used for sloppy marketing.

The Twitter/Foursquare tie up takes us a little further. Location gamification was never the big idea, writes Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley on Medium. "The big idea was to create a system that could crawl the world with people in the same way Google crawls web pages with machines. To then put all of what we’ve learned to use in helping people find the best and most interesting experiences in the real world."

Even serendipitously finding great destinations is just geo-location 1.0. What we want is having the best experience possible when we get there. The web was pretty darn cool, but then came web 2.0 and all those cool things started working together and the total was suddenly greater than the sum of the parts.

That's what's missing when it comes to location awareness.

I still can't believe that a location layer won't be the killer aspect to every app that can reasonably leverage it to enhance the customer experience. I've been spectacularly wrong about this for years, but I also think I'm just not right yet.

What do you think: Is this sort of thing just a matter of time, or a solution in search of a problem?