At Superlocal, our mission has always been to revolutionize the way people explore and navigate the world around them. As we continue to grow and evolve, we are constantly evaluating our features and making decisions to ensure the best possible experience for our users and the long-term success of our company.
With this in mind, we've made the decision to deprecate the live location sharing feature between friends on Superlocal. We understand this may come as a surprise to some of you, and we want to take a moment to explain our reasoning and share our vision for the future.
Why We're Making This Change:
Focusing on Core Value: While live location sharing has been useful for some, it hasn't been utilized as frequently as we anticipated across our user base. Our goal is to provide features that deliver significant value to the majority of our users.
Business Viability Concerns: Even with daily usage, it's a low engagement feature. This makes it challenging to monetize this feature effectively. It also has limited potential as a foundation for an ad platform. We've found it difficult to envision scaling this feature into a standalone revenue stream that could justify its operational costs.
Evolving Market Landscape: When we introduced live location sharing, it filled a unique gap. However, platforms like Snap Maps and Apple's FindMy have since become dominant in this space. We believe our efforts are better directed towards areas where we can truly innovate and differentiate ourselves.
Technical and Financial Considerations: We've explored various optimizations for live location sharing, including throttling algorithms, but significant challenges remain:
Scale Challenges: Even with optimizations, as our user base grows, the infrastructure demands increase significantly. For example, if we had 1 million active users, each connected to an average of 10 friends, and everyone updated their location once per minute, we'd be handling 10 million data transfers every minute. That's 600 million transfers per hour, or 14.4 billion transfers per day.
Complex Infrastructure: Ensuring timely updates across this network requires sophisticated systems operating 24/7, even with reduced update frequencies.
Privacy and Security: Protecting real-time location data for millions of interconnected users demands robust security measures, significantly increasing our operational complexity and costs.
User Experience Trade-offs: Throttling updates to reduce server load could lead to inaccurate location data, potentially diminishing the feature's value and user trust.
Ultimately, the decision to deprecate live location sharing was driven by several key factors, with business viability and resource allocation at the forefront. Our analysis revealed that the costs and technical challenges of maintaining persistent live location sharing would scale disproportionately as our user base grows, potentially outpacing our ability to monetize this feature effectively.
Moving Forward:
While we're saying goodbye to live location sharing, we're excited about Superlocal's evolution. We're focusing our resources on developing features that will enhance how you discover and interact with the world around you. Our team is working on our new intelligent search capabilities that will make Superlocal your ultimate companion for local exploration and discovery.
The future of our company is deeply tied to our new search feature, which you can try here.
