The biggest buzz word amongst developers and users at the moment has to be location based services.  Location based services, such as the GPS in your car, are certainly nothing new. They are,  however, becoming both more popular and more useful as devices embrace the technology and users become more location aware.

Mobile phones, such as the G1 and iPhone, have recently helped to boost the production of applications and web services solely build to deliver location dependant information.  Users have also become a lot more comfortable with sharing their location using services like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and BrightKite.

So what is the benefit for developers in knowing a user’s location? First and foremost it enriches both your application/website and the user’s experience.  Because you are using multiple parameters (i.e. geolocation, time, search query) it helps you to quickly deliver the right results, without having to inconvenience the user with unnecessary form filling.  Secondly, it helps you to run a more efficient service as only relevant data is delivered to the user.

A good example of an application that would benefit from location aware services, would be something like the yellow pages.  A user would simply be asked which service they require, and upon entering a keyword (e.g. “plumber”) they would be shown a list of nearby plumbers.

LBS (location based services) are not just restricted to the iPhone and satnav, as browsers are starting to get in on the game.  Mozilla has played with the idea in previous beta builds of their browser, Firefox, and is set to roll it out in the next version.