How can LBS go down?

Only the mobile characteristics of the development of LBS products can not be long, let's take a look at what LBS can do

lbs (Location Based service location services) based on mobile applications is becoming more and more out of place, and those who have no unique characteristics of the LBS community have slowly withdrawn from the market because the user activity is not high or the profit model is not clear. It is certainly disappointing for us that the seemingly saturated area of lbs has not yet appeared to be the product form we were expecting for the first time we knew about the concept of lbs.

Why does LBS have to be based on mobile?

There was a time when the Android phone had not turned into a cabbage price. In order to take care of many no GPS or not at all the low end of the smartphone, the mainstream of LBS support page "check-in" or use WAP page to allow users to manually sign in. This acquisition of POI (Points of information, which contains information about the location name, category, longitude, latitude, etc.) not only experiences bad but also leaves many users with a "cheat" loophole. Remember at that time, the use of three check-in LBS is open, muttering and street, the top two because of support for long-distance and PC-side check-in reasons, no matter when the line can see everyone a hot non-stop around the country scene. Only the street was sticking to the principle of banning PC check-in, so the popularity was not high.

However, with the popularity of the smart machine, with the help of the client and GPS, rapid positioning and check-in so that the street without cheating can accurately obtain POI information model is more favored by users. And the open and muttered also successively closed the PC end interface, and muttered in the LBS war was dumped out.

LBS benefits based on mobile apps for smartphones

1. Secure location information

Although Android phones can "allow analog locations" by opening the developer option, and then setting up a native location via Third-party software, a GPS information spoofing application location is forged. However, the technical difficulty and complexity of the action determines that it is not used unless you are coerced by a wife. Therefore, using smartphone mobile applications to build LBS can obtain accurate and reliable POI information, which is necessary for precision marketing (check-in or comment type) and interpersonal (dating).

2. Quick and easy process

This is a pseudo proposition, because it's convenient and quick to say that for the user, there is no need to search for a site with a WAP page in the age of the feature machine, and in a long list of results, identify your location by name. However, this convenience is directly caused by a non-intelligent machine or some of the unpopular smart machine users are forced to give up the possibility of using LBS.

3. In line with user habits

It's easy, you're not always with a laptop, with a desktop or iPad, but as a modern mobile phone is basically still going where to go, so based on the mobile phone is more suitable for "record movement trajectory" of the essential needs.

These are the advantages of existing LBS applications and their dilemma.

Not based on mobility?

We have three reasons to believe that if you are an entrepreneurial company that attempts to enter the LBS market, you will certainly recruit a lot of mobile engineers to ensure that the company's products are running on every intelligent platform. But is it possible to have a mobile LBS?

Today's LBS is divided into two categories: sign-ins and dating. The former almost all existing products are trying to profit through O2O, while the latter's profit model is not clear. (and recently very hot photo applications, here to treat them as a check-in)

However, both the check-in and the dating-style LBS community are not a good UGC (user generated content) platform. Because of the limitations of mobile platforms that lead to a single feature design, all LBS is loyal to a single service that serves. Any application that claims to be "geographically based XX community" is too thin on the PC community, which is determined by the characteristics of mobile applications. Users are less likely to create long-winded content on mobile platforms during fragmented time, in other words, if you want to create a core selling point that is content rather than evaluation, grading, recommending dishes, and LBS for nearby beauties, let mobile apps play with eggs.

What do you do without moving?

The personal ideal of LBS is a community based on interest or topic, not necessarily in mobile applications. If the three-letter lbs is removed, China's most successful community based on interests and topics is non-Baidu, so let's consider how we can blend the lbs factor into this already successful product.

First of all, the existing based on the interest of LBS (M bar, new version of the group of the MO) because there is no intention to give up mobile applications, so the information and user fragmentation of the problem. M-Bar Search "digital", we can see a lot of repeated "bar" by the different geographical location and a number of different text narrative to distinguish each other, but each "bar" in the content and number of members are not enough to form the scope of discussion.

However, in the community where content is the core selling point, the first thing to consider is how to take what the user wants to see. Because not when users search for a keyword, the first wish is to see the content related to the keyword, and POI information is only a supplementary information. In fact, in the check-in LBS, there are very few users in the first screen to see the location they want to sign in. After the search action is generated, the user's focus is not "Where am I now" but "what do I want to find".

Baidu to continue to stick for example, if we in the Baidu bar in the input "digital" digital two words then we can only reach the "digital", in strict accordance with the user's first needs classification. In the digital bar, we can see all the posts about digital.

So, how to integrate the LBS factor into it? Very simple, when posting automatically record the user's post location and provide according to POI information to sort.

All users who have used Discuz forum should have seen this filter bar, it can be convenient for users to choose according to "Post Time" on the ranking of posts, so as to ensure that the floating forum is always the latest post rather than the old post was Lai top. We can add the POI information as a new sort dimension to the traditional community, when the user login to the community through any terminal community records the user's current position, when the user enters a certain plate, post bar or group, by default to distance users to sort posts. In this way, a LBS rich content community is complete.

For a content-based community, the user's first requirement is content, and geographical location as an important ancillary factor but not absolute, so even if there is a user location fraud problem is not. Moreover, because the main purpose of the user is to browse the content rather than find the exact location, so do not worry about the lack of GPS help to locate the problem of insufficient accuracy.

How else can we play?

Having identified this most fundamental fusion approach, we can try to imagine adding POI factors to every traditional Web application, such as Consumer-to-consumer and news reading, which are very mature models. As a matter of fact, someone has already done it, trying to build a trading platform based on location information, and metropolitan Ban to rearrange the network news according to geographical location information.

Maybe one day we can also add POI stamp to help mail client and WebMail email automatic archiving, in the Peer-to-peer software algorithm to add POI information to download the effect of the connection optimization, the POI information added to the video site to users to push local preferences content, Based on geographical information of tourism souvenirs (native products) Recommended ...

It can be seen that the mere adherence to mobile features to develop LBS products may not be the only way out.