Although researchers have been building location-based social
services for some time now, sharing one???s location has only
recently been introduced to the more general population. This
paper examines real-world adoption of and resistance to Google
Latitude, a social mobile-device application for people to share
their locations. We report findings from an analysis of semistructured
interviews with 21 participants using grounded theory.
Our research reveals how interviewees perceive the social
affordances of location-sharing applications to be conceptually
intertwined with the conventions of other social networking and
communication technologies; Our findings emphasize that many
participants felt pressured to not only adopt social applications
such as location-sharing, but also to be responsive and accessible
at all times. Participants perceived technology-mediated social
interactions (such as ???friending??? someone) as highly symbolic,
and as problematic if they did not strictly adhere to the established
social etiquette. We also found that participants??? perception of the
social norms around using Latitude varied widely, affecting how
and whether participants used the system
