I’ve always been intrigued by location based applications. Fireball seems to have some potential as a good mashup with location based features built in. It just launched private Beta today. Twitter has always been a good fit for location based mashups because it can capture basic location data.
This one seems to be different though. In the past dodgeball seemed to have LBS locked down. I wish that Dodgeball would have caught on but it really lost momentum. When you can find out what your friends are up to and ways to meet up. That really is the sweet spot. Sure there are some stalkerish things that could happen but I think the positives outweigh the negatives. The biggest thing is finding a good level of transparency and privacy.
I hope that Fireball leverages mobile tech properly to tell you where your friends are. That would be exactly what I need (when I go out because I rarely do). Dodgeball could get really annoying because if you had a lot of friends your phone was constantly buzzing. The very short time that I played with it, as cool as it was. It drove me nuts. Guess we’ll just have to wait to see it roll outside of San Fran.
