The great promise of the internet – instant access to all the world’s information – has become one of its great frustrations. There is so much data out there that it can be hard to see what matters.

Web developers now face the challenge of connecting people with the information they need, and to make sure they can get it when they need it. One emerging group of technologies, location-based services, attempts to do just that by tailoring your experience of the internet according to where you are. It’s a lot more inspiring than its rather clunky name suggests. The idea is that instead of you looking for the information you need, it looks for you.

“Lots of people are working out ways of using Bluetooth or social networking or GPS to do these things,” saysHelen Keegan, managing director of Beepmarketing and a mobile marketing blogger. “People are already working out some cool and exciting services.”

Combined with mobile internet access, which liberates the web from homes and offices, location-based services – LBS – promise new ways of getting highly personalised information. Maps, directions, traffic news, restaurant recommendations, shopping price guides – the more this information can be targeted to a specific location, the more useful and valuable it becomes.

It also has a social application. Facebook and MySpace may dominate web-based social networking, but several small, mobile-based networks are making use of technology that lets people see the location of friends in their network – or at least those friends who want to be seen. And all of this information is like gold dust to advertisers, who can use the data to target people in a particular place, at a particular time or during a particular event.

Such tools can be even more useful, Ms Keegan suggests, if they respond to the context of an encounter as well as its location. In other words, the services need to make an educated guess about what the user wants.

“If I’m at Oxford Circus on Thursday morning at 11am between meetings, I don’t need a load of adverts telling me what special offers McDonalds has on,” she says. “I want to know if any of my buddies are in the area for a coffee. If I’m at Oxford Circus at 11pm, then I’m likely to be on a night out.”

The technical ability to offer location-based services is not new, but fledgling products and services created in the past few years have faced so many obstacles that until very recently they stood little chance of mainstream success. Now, at last, the hardware and software is coming together, the network is more robust, the cost of mobile data tariffs is falling and consumer interest is beginning to grow.

People who gave up on the mobile web after getting frustrated with patchy signal strength, clunky phones and cumbersome interfaces are being lured back by slimmer handsets, slicker browsers and better websites. The handset makers have been making great strides, but the biggest breakthrough has come from a new entry to the mobile market: Apple. When it launched the iPhone last summer, it proved that using the internet on a mobile phone could joyfully simple, and it set down a challenge to other phone manufacturers.

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year, the manufacturers responded. Nokia’s chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, acknowledged that “the mobile internet is the next global computing platform,” while all around him web-orientated handsets were being unveiled. They included Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X1, a smartphone whose innovative web browser and 7.2 megabit-per-second download speeds will rival many home broadband connections. More recently, the Taiwanese company HTC launched the Touch Diamond, a touch-screen phone clearly positioned to take on the iPhone. In some respects, it is already one step ahead of Apple’s handset – the Touch uses 3G, while the iPhone still relies on an older, slower network.

Google, the giant of the internet, is also getting involved. This autumn it will launch an operating system for mobile phones, which is designed to put the web at the heart of the handset and encourage people to use it. Google isn’t doing this out of altruism – it makes its money through advertising and it hopes that if more people use the web on their phones, the value of the mobile advertising market will increase accordingly. That’s good news for Google and the advertisers, of course, but mobile web users are also likely to benefit from better software and an increased range of services.

Google’s new system is likely to provide a secondary boost for location-based services by establishing an open platform on which other people can build tools and applications. Unlike the iPhone, which is locked down so that only official Apple software will run on it, Google’s system will be open to independent developers. The effect is likely to be an abundance of applications, similar in scope to the programs created for Facebook when it opened its social network to developers last year.

With many of the technological obstacles brushed to one side, location-based services are on their way into the mainstream. What is needed to accelerate the process, Ms Keegan says, is a Freeserve moment: when the upstart internet service provider came up with its 1p-per-minute price plan for dial-up web access, internet connections leapt forward. When mobile networks put together a similarly attractive package for the mobile web, “that’s when it will really hit the mainstream,” she says. “I hope that will be in the next year.”