Since the invention of the smart phone, I’ve noticed a growing trend in location based content. We’ve seen it in the raise of Foursquare, Gowalla and thousands of geolocation based APIs for both web and mobile. But my question is does anyone actually care where you are at any given moment? Maybe your mother does. She’s always been a bit of a worrier, right? I know mine was growing up. Is that really why these systems keep popping up?

I doubt it. Maybe it helps police officers find missing people? Maybe. It doesn’t seem to be helping them with any of the cases I’ve been reading about in the news lately.

This past week Facebook launched Facebook Places for their iPhone app. This started a series of rants on Twitter about the future of Foursquare and Gowalla. My guess is that these two applications are in trouble in their current form, but I don’t think we will see them disappear all together. Facebook has a strong following that has managed to push through and see the raise and fall of several other social groups like MySpace. But will Facebook Places really matter to anyone or will it just become more noise for you to sort through on the web?

Do we really want to have our news feeds cluttered with updates about every step our friends take during the day? I am definitely guilty of cluttering my friends and family’s news feeds with information, updates and links that they don’t care about. However, it’s part of my job to stay on top of this information and share it. So they understand. Some of chosen to block some of my feeds and I completely support their decision. I unfortunately think that we are going to start doing the same thing when it comes to knowing every location and every habit that our friends are up to. I’m not completely against location based updates. But I think they should be kept separate from Facebook.When I update my Foursquare or Gowalla status with a new Check-in, I only update my status to that particular service because that’s what it’s there for and that is what the audience expects to see. I’m given the option to update it through Facebook and Twitter but I don’t see it as important update through to those services because that’s not what the audiences on Facebook and Twitter are expecting to read about. Each of these social networks has it’s own style and personality when you start crossing the messages from one to the other, the social network starts to breakdown. MySpace is a prime example of this. It started so strongly but then we were given the option to customize our pages to put on whatever we wanted in order to express ourselves. You could add anyone at anytime and there was no real moderation of comments. This lead to a large portion of the audience to move on to ‘bigger and better’ things. Another example is Google Wave. It was a strange move for Google since they already had Google docs and chat. At first glance, the combination of the two seemed brilliant, but the true usability and need for it was simply lost on the majority of users, myself included.

I think Facebook places will unfortunately fall into this same category as Google Wave. We will see a strong initial support for it but if the gains from using it aren’t seen from users then we will see it slip into extinction within the year.

[Image courtesy of @Foursquare]