Social Networking and Mobile Apps

In the world of social networking and mobile applications, location clearly matters.  While social networking is focused on who is connected, seeing where those people are (and have been) is becoming a huge part of meeting up with friends in the real world and establishing online social status.

Increasingly, people are choosing mobile applications as the primary way they access information and interact over the Web.  Mobile apps are available anywhere and offer tailor-made access to the services people seem to care about most.

Social Networking

When Twitter introduced their Tweet location feature, they turned to us to supply the neighborhood place information to enable users the choice of geo-tagging their location at the neighborhood level.  Our Neighborhood Boundaries product line, with coverage across 6 continents, allowed Twitter to make Tweets more relevant to social networking users. Read more.

Geofencing, a process whereby users are notified when they or their friends cross virtual geofences, offers a host of opportunities to enhance the social networking experience.  Up until now, much of the emphasis has been on tagging updates with location information—but generating alerts and Tweets based on when your friends enter or leave areas, like choice neighborhoods, can give you a heads up about where the party is headed.  Also, using neighborhoods boundaries as geofences enables alerts based on when friends enter the neighborhood where you are hanging out.

Mobile Apps 

When the providers of Siri, a mobile virtual personal assistant, wanted to enable the best possible search options for users seeking restaurant reservations, movie tickets and event information, they licensed our GIS data to enable search by neighborhood.  With a mobile app driven by voice commands, allowing users to reference neighborhoods as a search parameter was the most natural way to correlate points of interest to geographic areas.

A key factor in many mobile applications is location.  There are now thousands of apps leveraging sophisticated location-based services, including geofencing.  Maponics can help companies looking to add features to their mobile apps by providing predefined geofences in the form of GIS data boundaries.