About four percent of online adults use a service such as Foursquare or Gowalla that allows them to share their location with friends and to find others who are nearby, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life project. On any given day, one percent of Internet users are using these services.
In a May 2010 survey, five percent of adult Internet users said they had used such a site.
Some seven percent of adults who go online with their mobile phone use a location-based service, the report suggests. About eight percent of online adults ages 18 to 29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group.
Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley says the future of Foursquare, the location based service is "what its users are going to do, not what they are doing."
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
