It is great to know where the nearest pizza place is. (The other night I was RAVENOUS and every else was closed. My iPhone found an open Pizza Hut and gave me precise details of where it was, how long it would take me to walk there and exactly how soon I'd arrive after its closing time.) Then it's reportedly great to have Facebook say where you are. I don't do that so much, I don't tend to check-in to places, but oodles of others do and they love it. I like getting an update that someone I know is somewhere amazing. But I don't need and I don't want to know which room, say, they're in at Buckingham Palace or how high up the Statue of Liberty they've got. That's too much and Macworld's Mike Elgan says companies know this. They know it and after all these years and all this work and all that effort designing systems that can tell us location details, they are choosing to be deliberately vague.
In every case – Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Safari for iOS and Google Chrome “Canary” – the companies have access to perfectly specific data and could easily show it to you. But as a service to you, as a user benefit, they're presenting you with vague information in place of specific information.
Why is vagueness a user benefit? Simple: Vagueness is humanizing.
I'll give you an example. People in real life don't say: “Wow! I just spent one-hundred and ninety-seven dollars and forty-two cents at Costco.”
They say: “Wow! I just spent a couple hundred bucks at Costco.”
People round numbers, guestimate how long things will take and speak in generalities. And they do it on purpose. Vague information is easier to receive and comprehend.
It's a smart observation and I hadn't made it.