Much ado is being made of Loopt’s just-announced background location feature where a combination of platform partners, AT&T and some special sauce are providing Loopt subscribers with an “Always-On Location Service.” While this is no doubt a technological marvel of a workaround for Apple’s blockage of background applications, the usefulness of such a feature is questionable.

While it might be fun to watch my friends run around on Google Maps like little ants, I am bored quickly without context. Sure, so you’re stuck in traffic on the 101. Why do I care? If your iPhone is in your back pocket transmitting your constant location while you’re sitting at work for 8 hours today, it does not interest me.

Location without context is dead.

Tell me where you are, what you’re doing and who you’re with… NOW I’m interested. This requires user interaction. Human touch. Location services are swell and all that, but until recently they’ve been lacking a divine spark.

Moreover, Loopt plans to charge users $3.99 a month for this Always-On feature. This seems odd since they can sanitize, aggregate and sell a user’s location data to advertisers for big bucks. Don’t you know InBev pays out royally to know which bars get the most foot traffic?

Between Facebook, Twitter and a handful of other services like ours, the places you go will become an increasingly important part of the social web. But I’d argue that uncensored location data vomit is not what the social web wants or needs. To Loopt’s credit, they seem to be planning to add greater emphasis on places in a future version of their service.

But time will tell if people are willing to pay to be stalked. Personally I’d rather let folks know where I am when I choose to do so.