Friending and friend discovery are core concepts (maybe the core concepts) of social media. There are really three main friending choices for social media sites: follow only (i.e. RSS); friend request approval (i.e. Facebook); or anyone can follow anyone, no reciprocal follow required (Twitter model). As social location services evolve, how friending takes place (and is handled by app providers) is going to greatly determine the popularity of location services in our opinion.

The why is quite simple – people generally only want to share their location with people they trust. Scratch that – with people they really trust. Not everyone is that way for sure (and we believe that more people will open up to the idea as time goes on), but right now, the general populace (read: your mom) doesn’t like the idea of sharing location with strangers (or even casual acquaintances) one bit. You could probably convince your mom that its ok to share your location with your BFFs, but beyond that, it’s rough going. Of course, adults don’t have to ask their mom to do anything (or shouldn’t have to), but adults get creeped out like moms do (and some adults are of course moms). That said, if you just become friends on location based services with the people you really trust, chances are your friend list won’t be too long (unless you’re a really really trusting person, in which case this post might not be for you). Let’s say for argument sake that you have 50 friends/relatives that you really trust. Will you only share your location with those 50 friends? How about the other 200 people you’re friends with on Facebook? Or the few hundred people that follow you on Twitter? Do you trust people you’ve probably never even heard of (which makes up the vast majority of most people’s Twitter followers) with your exact present location as well as your check-ins over time?

This is of course one of the main problems/concerns over social location sharing. Privacy has many levels – for instance, you may trust someone explicitly but not want to share your every movement with them – so we could go very deep into many aspects of privacy in this post, but we won’t (we’ll break it up for later posts). What we want to focus on here is how social location sharing services may deal with friending and at what point does it become spam and/or threatening?

We will say this right off the bat – privacy and friending procedures should be at the very top of the priority list for social location providers. Numero uno without a doubt. If you are running one of these services, figure this out, work with your users and innovate and you will do well. Don’t, and you’ll be left behind, as tepid users go somewhere just as fun, but safer.

So let’s break this down into four “friend” categories that we see: real friends; established contacts on other social media services (which can include your real friends); strangers; and brands/businesses.

Real friends

The main issue here is not whether or not to share your location with your real friends – which we will assume that users will do for the most part – but what privacy settings are available as filters. As we mentioned above, this is a whole post in itself, so we’ll reserve this discussion for a later post.

Established social media contacts

Many social media services – including location sharing ones – rely on data portability technologies (Facebook Connect, OpenID, OpenAuth, etc.) and email contact lists to import and invite ready-made contacts into their service. Users can choose which (if any) of their social contacts to import and invite, and a fair number of new users take advantage of this. This is standard and accepted fare in social media. However, when inviting someone to a location sharing service, this may not be so cut and dry, as users will probably have to think hard about whether sharing their location with these persons is what they want to do (especially when the only sharing option is “share” – i.e. precise privacy options are not in place). There is also the other side of the coin here, and that is the invited user accepting the invitation to share his or her location. Does the service require that sharing be mutual or can it be one-way (i.e. following like Twitter)? Regardless, location services will continue prompt users to mass invite their contacts, which will often include their real friends. While some users will receive requests from people they don’t recognize, there is at least some kind of previous connection between the two users, unlike the next two kinds of “friending”…

Strangers

Location sharing services and strangers – try freaking out your mom more. If you join a location sharing service, however, eventually strangers are going to request to become friends with you. Social media isn’t just about communicating with those you know but also discovering new people, i.e. strangers. With location based services this goes a step further, because unlike other social media, location is based in the real world, so often discovery is centered around location, which means that a stranger could be requesting you as a friend while standing right next to you. Or from somewhere on the same block. Or the same city. We’re not trying to creep anyone out – this is just the reality of location sharing services. This is amplified by the fact that a number of providers are adding social features that are focused around a specific location. This means, for example, that everyone that checks into a bar will be able to know who else has checked into the same bar with them – whether they’ve friended them previously or not. It also may mean that if you are in the same bar, people may be able to message you without being your friend. So how do providers avoid any of this becoming too creepy (if not worse)? We would suggest that social location sharing services need to make more of an effort to include a buffer in this process, perhaps a “Kevin Bacon” type of referral system that tells a user “this person is friends of Bob W. who is friends with Jim K.” etc (which is in a way how LinkedIn works, although LinkedIn’s model is way to cumbersome for fast-moving location services). Whether providers adopt this approach or other strategies, they need to create some kind of a creepiness buffer or they may possibly face a strong backlash from their users and potential users.

Brands/Businesses

The final group of “friends” are entities that are trying to sell you something, whether a Fortune 500 brand, a local convenience store or anything in between. Getting this right will be both very tricky and very important to any location service’s business model. It will be very tricky because unlike other social media sites that can just push these kinds of friending and messages aside (read: spam or ads pushed to the side of the website), with location enabled apps these “friend” requests can be triggered by where the users themselves go. For example, if a user visits a car dealership and shares that location, doesn’t that give the car dealership ownership and the car manufacturer an opening to invite you to be their “friend”? Certainly from the dealer’s and the manufacturer’s point of view. From a business model perspective, the location service provider in this case could charge both the dealer and the manufacturer a fee to have access to the user’s location. But what about the user? Just because they visited the dealership, does that mean they want to be “friends” with the dealer and/or the manufacturer? Some kind of coupon or advertisement may be acceptable to the user, but as a growing number of marketers know, the real benefits of social media result not from one off offers, but from long-lasting friend/fan/follower relationships with consumers. This has worked well with Facebook and Twitter – but in neither case is the user giving implicit permission to the brand/business to access their physical movements (Twitter now has optional geo-tagging of tweets, but we haven’t heard of any brand really using this to enhance the relationship with certain followers). But in a location sharing service, users sharing locations with brands would be implied after friending. This is not to say that there may not be some benefits to users that establish a “friend” relationship with brands, especially ones that have multiple physical locations (i.e. if a user is a friend with H&M, every time that user is with a certain distance of an H&M store, H&M could then send them offers). However, will this outweigh the uneasiness that users will feel with sharing their location data with not just one individual, but with an entire organization (i.e if a user shares their location with IBM, how many of IBM’s 400,000 employees now have access to that user’s location data?). Again, it will be a very tricky (yet business critical) issue for providers, and it will be interesting to see what users are willing to not only accept, but will also demand back from brands for sharing their location. As with other concerns we’ve pointed out here, we predict that solutions will need to revolve around privacy and promotional rules in conjunction with nuanced user settings.

Conclusion

Friending within social location sharing services will probably not follow the same patterns as we have seen in other social media services, because of the inherent physicality of this new type of social media. Social location sharing services will need to pay close attention to user feedback and adjust and innovate with the understanding that they are breaking new ground in how friending occurs.