Keep your friends at your fingertips, with a cellphone
When Tim Collins of Natick wants to know where his friends are and what they are doing, all he has to do is glance at his phone.
Collins and a handful of his friends use Buddy Beacon, a friend-finding service for mobile phones that allows them to keep tabs on one another throughout the day.
Collins said he joined for the entertainment value, but suspects the service may actually be useful.
"I have visions that I'll be stuck in an airport and pull it up, and notice a friend is also stuck" a few gates away, Collins said.
The service could also provide a simple way to keep tabs on his daughter, if she will update her location from time to time.
"When I just want to talk to my daughter, she finds it embarrassing - but I find she actually will respond to text messages very quickly," he said.
As people of all ages have become comfortable with keeping tabs on friends through online social networks that include minute-by-minute status updates, the major wireless carriers are beginning to take the types of interactions that have become common online into the real world, using the phone.
"A year ago, the business models were not in place, the technology was not mature. Now we're understanding that location, that context, is king," said Shiv Bakhshi, an analyst at IDC.
Location "will be embedded in all kinds of services you are offered - space and time are two dimensions in which we all work."
This month, Verizon Wireless launched a social-mapping service called Loopt on its network. It charges $3.99 a month, allowing people to share their locations, broadcast their status to friends, and share and tag photos.
Sprint began offering Loopt for $2.99 a month last summer.
AT&T does not yet offer such a service, but plans to, a spokeswoman said.
T-Mobile is testing location-based search but it has not announced any plans to offer friend-finding services.
"Location is the redefining element of mobile communication and the consumer experience," Sam Altman, chief executive and cofounder of Loopt, said in a prepared statement.
A Boston mobile applications firm, uLocate Communications, developed a competing friend-finding service, called Buddy Beacon, for the mobile operator Helio in late 2006. It has expanded the service aggressively to work on Sprint, Alltel, Metro PCS, and the iPhone.
"Carriers have gone through a process of determining what types of products, what types of services they want to bring to market. Navigation was the first home run; family-finding was a follow-on to that," said Dan Gilmartin, vice president of marketing at uLocate. "I think the notion of your status, and where you are and what you're up to - and being able to easily share that with folks you specifically want to share it with - does become an important element of the mobile experience."
Location-finding technology seems like a natural fit for cellphones, and location-enabled handsets have proliferated in the United States because of the 911 system. Federal rules require that mobile phones make it possible for police, fire, ambulance, and other emergency services to locate callers.
Using Global Positioning System technology is one way of adding location service to cellphones. The market for GPS-enables phones is projected to grow rapidly; ABI Research estimates the number of such phones, at 140 million in 2007, will reach 600 million in 2012.
But privacy advocates worry that cellphones could become tracking devices. Location-based services attempt to overcome those concerns with controls that mean only approved friends can see a person's location, or that give people control over whether they want to update their location information.
The trade group CTIA-The Wireless Association this month introduced guidelines for location-based services, including an example of the need to protect users' privacy when they use friend-finding applications.
But what has driven the industry most may be that people are finally ready for that sort of socializing.
"As more people play on social networks online, they get used to the idea of having contact and relationships in other spaces," said Adena Schutzberg, executive editor of Directions Magazine.
"In a sense this just adds another layer."
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com. 