| Great read on the possible rationale - Summarising #1 It Hurts Google - erodes googles dominance vis a vis commercial access to geospatial data + a viable reason to collect valuable location data on end users. #2 It Complements Their Augmented Reality Business #3 It Supports Facebook’s Place Data Generally
"what if street level imagery and supplementary data like reviews were built directly into Facebook’s products or at least resided somewhere on a Facebook property that could be linked out to? That at least would keep users in their scrupulously measured web of control." I would flesh out one related/adjacent point. ~Google's mission statement: "Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." ~Facebooks Mission Statement: "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together" I'm not so naive as to suggest these ideals aren't deeply infiltrated/influenced by commercial imperatives but it is possible to see the way some of their behavior wraps around the stated principles. Google's credo of organizing information aligns with building out immense location data - and effectively mapping the world (and subsequently commercializing it). Whereas with facebook what I have noticed is - given their size and scale; they can follow their users (and subsequently envelope/"empower" user efforts to create community) ...if need via acquisition. In the digital world this has mean't buying the likes of instagram and whatsapp to ensure that community-building happens under the nexus of Facebook's control. If you accept that facebook believes in being where it's users are; understanding/being more proximate to users and how they traverse the real-world is invaluable - you are now more able to map out a digital proxy that is informed by person's experience of the real world. By creating a more informed digital proxy you embed a user more deeply in your ecosystem. |