Nokia announced last week that it is buying bit-side GmbH in an effort to increase its social network mapping presence. Social network mapping goes beyond getting directions or finding retail services near your current location.With social network mapping, you and your private network of friends or co-workers can always be updated to each other's locations. You can also share images, your current status, and any other travel experiences with your network. Think of it like Twitter but with more features and less public. The service may also allow alerts that will tell you when your companion is close to you so you don't miss each other at sporting events or the mall. "Nokia believes that context plays a pivotal role in the evolution of the Internet. To make the Internet truly personal, Nokia is building the ability for people to always know where they are and what is around them. Moreover, to know where their friends are and what they are doing and how they are feeling. Nokia calls this social location," said Michael Halbherr, Nokia VP and head of social location. These types of services can be really useful, especially in a situation where a family is on vacation. If you are at Disney World's Magic Kingdom and you wanted to split up for a few hours to ride different things that not everyone is interested in, you no longer have to specify that you'll meet back at a certain place at a certain time, which invariably means someone is either late or they get there really early because the ride they want has a wait time that will take them past the deadline. With social network mapping, just tell everyone to be in a general area in a rough time frame. As everyone makes their way there, the network will tell you when you are close to someone. This isn't just for your personal life, either. Work can benefit from this if you are out of town at a convention and need to hook up with client and co-workers. While this service holds a lot of promise, especially as more and more phones have GPS chips in them, I wonder if a cell manufacturer is the best entity to push this forward? From Nokia's standpoint it is, as it will encourage people to buy a Nokia phone if they want to be in your network. There are platform-agnostic services like Britekite that attempt to do the same thing, but the experience can be very different, depending on which phone you have. Some devices, like the iPhone, have a feature-rich application you can install that takes advantage of specific features on the device. Other platforms, like Windows Mobile or the BlackBerry, generally have to resort to somewhat limited Web pages to use the service.

Google also just jumped into this area today with Google Latitude, and its service supports a wide variety of devices today, with more support on the way. Social network mapping is still in its infancy. It remains to be seen whether Nokia can become a leading provider in this service. I tend to think the market will favor a service that isn't dependent upon the phone or carrier, though, and Google's entry into this market makes it a daunting task for any competitor to tackle.