Most Aren't Checking In To Location-Based Services, Pew Study Finds

Facebook said yesterday that "millions" are using Places, its recently-launched "check in" application. Foursquare boasted that 20,000 of its 4 million members earned its "I voted" badge. Gowalla celebrated its 20 millionth check-in, and SCVNGR made headlines for going global and being the first to take advantage of Google's Place API.

Location-based social networking services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt, are a hot topic in the tech world. Yet despite these milestones, a recent study from the Pew Research Center offers sobering statistics on the extent to which they've taken off among mainstream users.

The finding: Most aren't checking out check-in services.

Just 4% of online adults use location-based services, Pew reports, adding, "On any given day, 1% of internet users are using these services."

The Pew study also found that the share of men (6%) using these location-based services is double the share of women (3%). Geosocial services were found to be more popular among online Hispanics than online whites or blacks--according to Pew, "10% of online Hispanics use these services," versus 3% of online whites and 5% of online blacks--and users between 18 and 29 years old were much more likely to take advantage of the check-in services: "8% of online adults ages 18-29 use location-based services, significantly more than online adults in any other age group," Pew notes.

It remains to be seen whether Facebook Places, which launched in August of this year, will help take location-based services mainstream. Pew's survey was conducted between August 9 and September 13 of this year, with Places barely a month old.

We want to know how HuffPost readers compare to the "online adults" surveyed by Pew. Take our poll and weigh in below--do you think these services will catch on? Why or why not?

Quick Poll

Do you use location-based services?

Yes.

No.

Share your vote on Facebook so your friends can take this poll

Comments

[MplsStyme]

12:35 PM on 11/08/2010

Neat idea but no one trusts the companies that want to track your every step. Maybe if people trusted, The Government, Myspace, Facebook, or ..... they may let you know where they are but I don't want that guy I've been trying to avoid know where I'm at, let alone let some company buy where I like to hang out so they can sell me more junk. If these sites would stop selling our info to people we may share more than the what we already do. I know I aggreed to the 30page legal disclosure to log in because I had no choice if I wanted to use the service, but really I don't want you to sell info about me. They need to have real opt out abilities for selling my personal info to sales people, political parties, ect...

[southingtonian]

05:47 AM on 11/08/2010

Is this the U.S. version of the Singapore biometric id card, which tracks the holder's location in real time?

[speeedbump]

05:19 PM on 11/06/2010

I would not use it. It would be a perfect time to rob someone just as they update their status to show that they are a good hour or more away.

[Terry Barton]

04:27 PM on 11/05/2010

I treasure my privacy.I don't need to inform everybody that I know where I am 24/7.I'm also not interested in everyone"s day to day mundane life.

[saskatoonie]

07:57 PM on 11/05/2010

It's as if everyone who does this is living a second childhood. " Doesn't everyone care about me, aren't I the most important person in the world?"

[deancollins]

04:13 PM on 11/05/2010

Dennis Crowley spoke yesterday at Adtech about how Foursquare expected to move to a GPS solution that buzzed you to ask if you wanted to check in if you visited a place you had checked i previously eg turning a 4 step process into a 2 step process (though requiring a back end application to be running continuously....how you going to do that on a iPhone?)


I do agree though, checking in for the sake of checking in seems to be wearing out it's welcome.

There needs to be something else in the backend to "quid pro quo" the desire to interact.
At http://www.livechatconcepts.com/ we "check in" users when they interact with one of our sites eg http://www.livefootballchat.com/ or http://www.livebasketballchat.com/ etc but at the end of the day checking in and posting a note out to your twitter and facebook accounts saying you just logged in secondary;The primary purpose is being on the site to chat live while watching the game.

Yes badge information is interesting but you need to provide more to keep your users coming back.

Cheers,
Dean

[amber15]

12:17 PM on 11/05/2010

how stupid do they think we are.....

might as well just go to http://pleaserobme.com/ and let them know there.

profits over sanity, beautiful.

[Flygande Jakob]

12:07 PM on 11/05/2010

Man, these "services" are creepy and pointless (is there a point that eludes me? genuinely curious.) and an official 96% of online adults don't care what the other 4% are doing. :O I don't get how these services hang around when after, what, a year, you could hardly say they're catching on.

[Mysticdf]

11:58 AM on 11/05/2010

yes because it stupid on so many levels!!

[uncc49er]

11:55 AM on 11/05/2010

These services are pure bubble. There is little value in them. They create a cultural demand that it is cool to let people know where you are at, and for a while they sell it to insecure people who think it is cool to let everyone know about details of your life, but regrets follow soon.

[facepalm12]

11:37 AM on 11/05/2010

I love letting everyone on the internet know when i'm not at home.

[nowpolitics]

04:18 AM on 11/05/2010

What is 'location-based service'?

[SilentSolidarity]

01:07 AM on 11/05/2010

Yeah, it's only a "check-in." It is not that they would sell your private information to companies that will flood you with ads.

Internet rule #1: Nothing is free.

[Alien Nation]

01:00 AM on 11/05/2010

It's cool in conception, dumb in implementation.

[City of Evil]

11:02 PM on 11/04/2010

I'm not surprised at all. I can see applications for these things in some narrow domains - maybe you run a courier company, and you want to keep track of where your guys are, so you can dispatch them more efficiently. But why on earth would regular people want it?

[lilylee86]

09:52 PM on 11/04/2010

I haven't used a location-based services, but I don't want to fall into the electronic marketing trap.
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