Known Unknowns: Location, Location, Location

This past weekend, I was suckered by some friends into joining an impromptu bar crawl (hey, twist my arm, ow, okay) in Ye Olde Reston Towne Centre (it’s an upscale-ish, mixed use “don’t-call-it-a-mall” in the outer DC suburbs of northern Virginia).

Coincidentally, I’ve been getting more active trying out Foursquare, a location-based mobile social network — you go to a bar, restaurant or other attraction, tell the service your location via phone or mobile device, it broadcasts your location (mine is set to also post to Twitter, and since my Twitter goes to my Facebook status, updates that, too), and it notifies you if friends are also there.

(It also has a points/competition aspect, which doesn’t win you anything except bragging rights, but also serves to activate the gaming, gambling, and rewards parts of your brain.)

Anyway, as the night progressed and we were moving from place to place, I was dutifully updating my location. At some point, one of my friends, who was also a Facebook friend (and a hardcore user, too — she was checking status updates on her smartphone), saw one of my updates and said: hey, what gives — why are you posting that you’re in DC?

Apparently, Foursquare has a known problem distinguishing between multiple locations that share the same name. Because the place I was at was part of a chain, it picked the DC location, which was about 20 miles east of where I actually was. (They’re working on the problem, and there are workarounds involving unique location names. Plus it may not be as much of a problem if you have your phone’s GPS location transmitter turned on. I don’t.)

Not that this was anything important (this time), but the fact that I was inadvertently transmitting misinformation was a little irritating.

In the Location Game, Wrong Information Is Worse Than No Information

So what’s the point of this anecdote? When it comes to location-based services, accuracy matters. In many things online, good enough is usually good enough, but not when it comes to near-realtime physical location. Close may count in horseshoes and hand grenades, but not for location-based services, or at least ones that promise the kind of granularity that you can use for ad hoc meetups on-the-fly — rather than the more appointment-like services with messages like “I’m in Denver for the weekend, anyone around?” (which is how some of these services started out.)

Location is also complicated by the additional consideration of time — if you’re posting perfectly accurate location updates that are offset temporally by a few minutes, it’s not a current location, it’s a historical record.

In Rumsfeldian-terms, knowing that you don’t know someone else’s location is a “known unknown” (you know that you don’t know where your friends are, and in fact, may not even think about it). Whereas thinking you know something that’s actually incorrect (by dint of time or space) is an “unknown unknown” (you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know), which can be a whole lot worse.

Have your own run-in with location-based services? Leave a comment below.

[Incidentally, there’s a local DC band called the Known Unknowns. I don’t know if they’re still active and I’ve never seen them live, but I’ve heard a few tracks — they’re pretty good.)