Location, location, location. That’s the common refrain about how to have a successful business, right? Well, now it’s the common refrain of mobile app developers, too, and the song is reaching a crescendo this week, with Where 2.0, the location-based everything conference going on in San Jose.
Today, Skyhook Wireless is announcing a software developers kit called “Local Faves”, which will help developers to add location to any iPhone app. So for those of you saying “Location, location, location”, we say, get to it.
Similar to SimpleGEO, a more robust service that offers location data storage, formatting and even a marketplace for location data. The Local Faves SDK, on the other hand, looks like a simple way to add location to an app, and that’s that.
From the company on what it expects the SDK to be used for:
Developers traditionally use location in apps that are tied to the physical environment, like navigation, social networking, weather, and search. Local Faves is designed to bring the context of location to digital content-based apps, like music, wine, food, reference, books, and more. […] Local Faves features fully customizable content tagging, allowing users to indicate that that they loved, hated, ‘favorited’, saw, or read a piece of content within an app, and enables sharing of this content, and exactly where it was experienced, via Facebook and Twitter.
To all of this, we have to say “If you got it, use it.” Why not add location when you can? Why keep location separate and quarantined for specific mobile apps and not others? We know we said we wouldn’t be using Twitter’s web-based location, but adding location to any and all mobile apps (as an opt-in feature, of course) seems like common sense.
Although the company hasn’t offered any specifics on what platforms this will be available for, a report the company put out earlier this month would appear to hint at its intentions at growing the location market for all platforms.
Skyhook Wireless says that AppMakr plans on adding its SDK’s features to its platform for news apps and points to several other apps, such as Audobon Guides, where it plans to see it used. The Local Faves SDK will be available for developers in mid-April – and you can sign up to find out when.
Don’t miss the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit on May 7th in Mountain View, California! We’re at a key point in the history of mobile computing right now – we hope you’ll join us, and a group of the most innovative leaders in the mobile industry, to discuss it.
