Share Your Where… When Sharing Everything Might Be Too Much
Jun 1st, 2009 by TVG Staff
You can follow someone on Twitter, request friendships on Facebook, and now you can Glympse™ your friends and family. What is Glympse™ you ask? It’s a new technology that allows you to send “Glympses” to your friends and family letting them know where you are at any time, in any place. It’s a mobile location-sharing program that can be downloaded to your phone, but only if it’s a T-Mobile G1 phone, for now. The program should be available soon to other leading smartphone devices, like the Blackberry®.
Once you download the Glympse™ software onto your phone, you can send people a Glympse™ for a certain period of time, meaning they will either be able to tell exactly where you are for those five seconds that you allow, or they can track you on a map for up to four hours, but it is ultimately up to the sender. The recipient of your Glympse™ does not have to download the program in order to follow you or see where you are currently located. As a recipient, you would be able to see information such as, what street the driver is on, what his/her speed is, as well as traffic conditions.
The makers of Glympse™ are marketing their product as a way to let your co-workers know that you’re running late for a meeting, let your friends know you are running late for the baseball game or let your family know you made it to your destination and that you’re OK. They even have a YouTube video on their Web site explaining the simplicity and usefulness of Glympse™. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have both praised this product as an efficient way to get in contact with co-workers, friends and loved ones, but they also note the level of “creepiness” in the Glympse™ program.
As if Facebook status updates and tweets aren’t enough, now you can send someone your exact location as they follow you on a map until you reach your destination? Talk about an invasion of privacy.
My question is this: when will it stop? Just last night at dinner my friends and family were discussing one of my friend’s obsession with constantly updating her Facebook status, but her mom argued it let her sleep better at night knowing where her child was at all times. “She might not call like she’s supposed to, but with Facebook, at least I always know what she’s up to,” she said. Maybe she’s right.
Will Glympse™ simply ease the worrying minds of parents with teenagers and the spouses of business-travelers, or will it be cause for ex-significant others and nosy neighbors to stalk you? I’m not sure, but I do know that our society is changing, and in a world where stalking someone online is kosher… I ask again: will it ever end?
A lot of my friends have started to treat social media as stalking. “What kind of stalking are you doing today?” One of my friends said that she felt that people were so busy talking about their lives in tiny, micro-blogs that they’re not enjoying their lives anymore.
I don’t think it will end, but it will become harder to use social media to reach consumers in a way that’s meaningful. They’ll get tired of it and start to filter most of it out.
I agree, and I often feel that way too. Cassie made a good point in her “Social Media Overload?” blog post last month: “I have enough things in my life to worry about already without adding updating my Facebook page to the list.” Yet Facebook is being left in the dust with all of these new technologies, allowing us to be connected to someone, somewhere, at all times.
I don’t think it will end either, and finding new ways to reach your audience through social media will become more difficult. As a consumer of social media myself, I know I tend to filter a lot of things out and only click on links that really grab my attention or truly interest me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Sharon. We hope to continue to hear more from you.