With hundreds of millions of active accounts across numerous platforms, it is fair to say that social media has already brought many changes to people’s lives, but can it change our interactions with the built environment?

If the rapid adoption of geo-location technologies within social media continues, then it looks like it could. Geo-location is a technology which allows your online activities to be tagged with geographical data. This is the backbone of services like Foursquare, where users can check-in to locations on their smartphones - phones which recognise the proximity of the user to the venue they are checking-in to.

These services allow users to see whereabouts in the city their friends are, opening up a new way of interacting with people they know, and the cities they live in. But geo-location offers more than just this. Uploading a photo to Flickr? Geographical data can be linked to your images allowing others to know the exact location it was taken. Applications can then use this data to show all photos taken in a certain area, with both Google and Microsoft integrating this technology into their Maps services.

And the more established social media players are on board as well. Twitter has introduced a feature where your location is linked to a tweet, and Facebook is also close to unveiling its geo-location offering.

So has this technology got the potential to become mainstream and significantly alter the way we interact with the areas we live? Are areas with poor 3G access going to be left behind as the rest of the country becomes geo-focussed? Or is it just a flash in the pan?

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Image via Nan Palmero on flickr.