Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of location based services, and we know consumers are out there and many want you to find them. With the popularity of Foursquare, and recently Path, they’ve become potential goldmines for important consumer data – what they’re day to day activities look like, who they’re with, and where they visit on a regular basis. And yes, there’s still concern around privacy issues, but consumers are still demanding that marketers understand all of their daily contexts to make their lives easier.

However, my main problem with location based services is the very fact they aren’t contextualized and that they’re separate apps rather than a built in feature of a phone. What I mean by contextualized is that the phone should automatically notify me right as things happen, without me taking any actions. Instead of the phone simply being a caddy, it should really do the actions for me…scary but awesome! Here’s just two user scenario I’m thinking of:

“If I’ve got a scheduled meeting at a different location, instead of generic 10 min meeting reminder, it should notify me to leave for 25 minutes ahead due to a traffic accident along my route.”

“If Im at bar or restaurant, again that I’ve decided to let check-me in, it should automatically notify me of others within my social network, who i’ve subscribed too, that are also at that location.”

Secondly, once the privacy issues are dealt with you, you shouldn’t have to manually check-in to anywhere. With the new technology of geo-fencing, I should be able to walk into a location that I’ve opted into, and it should automatically check me in. Yes this requires GPS in your phone to constantly be running in the background, draining the phones battery, but as we continue to make improvements in that area I have no doubt that geo-fencing will be vital to the success of location based services.