Sorin Adam Matei
Localaware Media

28 percent Americans search for spatial information on their mobiles, 4 percent use location aware services, such as Gowalla or Foursquare – Pew Internet Research

Sorin Adam Matei
Mobile Garden at @punchcut
Image by Joshua Kaufman via Flickr

About 1/4 of Americans use some sort of mapping or location based information service via mobile. This includes mapping and location aware services alike. Only a small proportion, @ 4% of adults, use services such as Foursquare or Gowalla.

Americans are not currently all that eager to share explicitly their location on social media sites, but they are taking advantage of their phones’ geolocation capabilities in other ways,” said Kathryn Zickuhr, Pew Internet Project research specialist and co-author of the report. “Smartphone owners are using their phones to get fast access to location-relevant information on-the-go.”
The results reported here are based on a national telephone survey of 2,277 adults conducted April 26-May 22, 2011.

via Pew Report: Social Location-Based Services.

Sorin Adam Matei

Assistant Vice President for Partnerships in Strategic Defense Innnovation and Professor of Communication at Purdue University, Director of the FORCES initiative leads research teams that study the relationship between technological and social systems using big data, simulation, and mapping approaches. He published papers and articles in Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Information Society, National Interest, and Foreign Policy. He is the author or co-editor of several books. The most recent is Structural differentation in social media. He also co-edited Ethical Reasoning in Big Data,Transparency in social media and Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods (Computational Social Sciences) , all three the product of the NSF funded KredibleNet project. Dr. Matei's teaching portfolio includes technology and strategy, online interaction, and digital media analytics classes. A former BBC World Service journalist, his contributions have been published in Esquire and several leading Romanian newspapers. In Romania, he is known for his books Boierii Mintii (The Mind Boyars), Idolii forului (Idols of the forum), and Idei de schimb (Spare ideas).

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