Social Media and Digital Swarms

There has been lots of buzz lately around location-aware solcial networks such as Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/), Gowalla (http://gowalla.com/), and Loopt (http://www.loopt.com/).  Now Facebook is muscling into the game with its 400M+ user base.  It will be announcing a location-based service sometime today.  The real question is where will this lead us?  Right now, over 50% of users are willing to share their location information in exchange for useful data (advertisements, local info) according to a recent study )http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/51140-half-of-mobile-users-willing-to-share-location-with-advertisers)  But as the volume of targeted advertising increases on their mobile devices, where will this value exchange end?  In my book, The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution (http://www.whartonsp.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=013700379X), I talk about two future scenarios: Nature Aligns where users are willing to share everything with little/no security or privacy risks and get significant benefits in return that improve the quality of work/life; and Killer Bees where the use of personal data becomes toxic and is used to unwillingly exploit consumers and degrades the overall value of the networks that make this data available.  I am hopeful that companies like Foursquare and Facebook understand the fragile game they are playing and carefully manage the ramp up in a way that matches the willingness of users to participate in the value exchange.  If users begin to see little value in exchange for an ever-expanding window into their lives, location-based services are doomed to failure.