Location Sharing is a hot topic amongst mobile enthusiasts and social networking fiends. With new and improving services like FourSquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Latitude, there are a lot of options.
Each of them has their own strengths and weaknesses from the Checkin-centric services like FourSquare and Gowalla, to the real-time location based services like Latitude, and hybrids like Loopt. But, in every case, one important feature is missing.
It’s nice to be able to let people know where you are. Real-time location provides that and, with tenacity on the part of your contacts, can even indicate if you is currently in transit. But if your friends don’t find out where you are until you get there, it often makes it difficult if not impossible to actually meet you there.
What these services lack is the ability to indicate the intent to arrive at a particular location and even an estimated arrival time. Instead of checking in at my local pizza place when I get there and finding my friends showing up just as I’m leaving, I should be able to, instead, check in my intent to go to that establishment at a certain time. Then my friends could contribute their mutual intents and then our paths would be highly more likely to collide.
A truly smart service could even indicate when a person was in transit and where they were in transit from based on either real GPS data or their last check in location.
I’m sure someone will build it. I’m just waiting to see who. Until then, I use Foursquare and Latitude, each with different purposes and neither really providing the most useful service.