Location Verification Creates Valuable Social Curation
By David Rush

As the overwhelming amount of social content created each day continues to grow, we find ourselves looking for new ways to cut through the noise and find the information that is most relevant to us. The concept of social curation is not new. Pinterest and Reddit have already demonstrated how users value the democratized process of aggregating and ranking content based on relevancy or utility at a particular moment in time.As social curation techniques continue to evolve, there are new ways for us to consider how existing technologies can add filters that will help further the goal of delivering relevant content to the right audiences.

Another way to consider effective social curation is through the concept of user qualification. In other words, if we restricted social contributions to a subset of users based on certain qualifications, wouldn’t we bring more integrity and relevancy to results? For example, if only season ticket holders for a baseball team could comment or vote on what concessions were sold at the ballpark, wouldn’t the results carry more importance than if just anyone could weigh in?

Up to this point in time, location-based technologies have primarily been used to facilitate the common “check-in” or to connect people within a network who may be near one another. Rather than seeing location as a required license or qualifier to express more credible opinions to those outside of our social networks, it has been used to share our whereabouts with friends and others in our social network.

Ironically, we already use location to qualify and curate information in our everyday lives. For example, a person who witnesses a bank robbery is uniquely qualified to provide police with a more credible account of what happened. The police don’t know the witness socially, yet they know this person has valuable insight to share based on where they were at a given moment in time. Likewise, the sideline reporter covering a football game is able to provide a more authentic, firsthand account of injury reports, interviews with coaches and details of what is happening on the field in real time.

We can now begin to use location-based technologies to qualify a person’s ability to create social content that has relevance to their physical location at a specific moment in time. Imagine a filter requiring that any reviews written about a restaurant or hotel be made only by the patrons dining at that restaurant or the guests staying at that hotel. How about feedback on the selection at a store coming only from shoppers perusing the aisles with photo-ready smartphones to capture the inventory for others to view? These insights carry more credibility for those who want real-time information from people, or strangers, at a particular location. Rather than forcing users to ascertain which opinions are trustworthy, they would instantly have a qualifier attached to content based on location. And as for the contributors, their opinions and insights would naturally carry more weight and credibility. They would know that they were being heard.

By using someone’s location to qualify content creation, we have an opportunity to enable a new interest graph or “interest network” that produces smarter, more actionable content. And that is what social curation is all about.

Photo Credit: Emily Chang via Photo Pin / Creative Commons

David Rush is CEO of Evzdrop, a next generation location-based information network that gives people an exclusive voice of real-time insight from their locations.