Friday, March 26, 2010

Location: Facebook + Nokia Ovi Maps

Location: Facebook + Nokia Ovi Maps

The other day I had a blog post about the Location wars and of course the next day there was some very interesting news from Facebook and Nokia Ovi Maps. 

Basically they've worked together to get location directly from Nokia Ovi Maps Application into Facebook. The same way how twitter broadcast a location, it is now available as well on Facebook. 

Why is this huge? 
  • Nokia Ovi Maps has more then 200 million users worldwide and is soon becoming together with Google Maps the top GPS solution for the mobile user.
    This helped as well with this year announcement that all GPS navigation will be free of charge for user of Nokia Ovi Maps. This was a huge announcement and if they start now as well to extend this towards Facebook and more integration it will be very but very nice. 
  • Facebook is the largest social network in the world, no introduction necesairy.
    But untill this event, location have been very low in the priorities of Facebook. Basically they only wanted to copy first Friendfeed and then Twitter when they bought Friendfeed. But this is the first time they are developing into a new area. 

Prognosis
With their highly successful iPhone and Android app it will be very easy to connect this one through to their own mobile application. This all on basis of the Ovi Maps data, what they could license for a fee. 

This combination would throw them from back in the location field towards straight into the top position in no time.

Let's see what the next steps will be but in the first view, it's becoming more and more interesting all the different parties. 

What do you guys think about it? 

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Jaap Willem
http://www.jaapwillem.com
Twitter: jaapwillem

Posted via email from JaapWillem Blog

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