Say hello to our little new category, "ReBlog of the Week". Every Thursday, Next Great Thing will choose a smart, insightful, and relevant blog post to be featured on our site. This week it is Clive Thompson's piece in Wired, "Future of the Web: Location, Location, Location" that caught our attention.
When Sam Altman visits New York, he's never alone for very long. Altman is the 24-year-old CEO of Loopt, a company that makes a "location-aware" app for mobile phones that tracks where all of your friends are and what they're doing.
"I'll pull it out on the ride in from the airport, and before I've even gotten to the city I'll have figured out who's nearby me, and we'll be making plans to get together that night," Altman told me. If he looks on his phone's map on a Saturday night, he can literally see groups forming in real time. "It's getting to the point now where if you want do something social, you have all this information about the world around you," he says.
Location-based applications are quickly becoming the hot new thing on phones. Since many mobiles today — most particularly the iPhone — can determine their location via GPS chips (or pinging local cell towers and WiFi signals), they're spawning a whole new ecosystem of apps. There are social ones like Loopt or foursquare, which track the movement of friends as well as find-stuff tools like Yelp that locate top-rated bars and restaurants near you. According to web-research firm Compete, one in three mobile-phone owners uses location-based tools, and the number of apps has exploded from 500 to 2,500 since last October.
Yet this new class of information tool violates everything we normally think about the internet.
The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down.
Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction — because your location becomes most important thing about you. So how is the return of geography going to change our lives?
The near-term effects are obvious: We're using it as a sort of radar for our social lives and Yellow-Pages needs. The first round of geo-aware phone apps has consisted mostly of "listings" services and tools for tracking your posse.
Altman thinks these apps are already tweaking people's everyday behavior. Early adopters often allowed only approved friends to track them; but now a larger chunk of Loopt users publish their location openly, for anyone to see. Why? Being open allows for more happy encounters — hook-ups with friendly strangers who are useful, or at least interesting, to know.
What's the next? It's probably ''tagging:'' Writing up notes, implanted in space, that describe something interesting about a particular location. Some apps already offer crude versions of this: With Socialight or Brightkite or Graffito, people can pick a spot on the map — using their phone or browser — and post a note that others will see when they're nearby.
These markups are still pretty sparse, but they're intriguing: When I wander through midtown Manhattan, I find it's an odd mix of the utilitarian — notes warning me that a bar has awful service, or recommending an awesome music store — and grippingly personal: a dispatch describing where somebody had a breakup and what it was like.
"It's like this form of Terminator vision," jokes Socialight founder Dan Melinger, whose app is set to launch soon on the iPhone. He thinks that as more and more people tag the real world, it will create a sort of parallel, invisible internet of data floating over our everyday lives.
"You can figure out the mood of a place by searching for all notes in an area," Melinger adds. What types of music do people listen to in this neighborhood? What do they argue about?
All those tracks of our lives form an enormously rich stream of information. So most geo-app pioneers are developing collaborative-filtering tools that find patterns in the data; for example, recommending other people you might want to "friend" because they have similar everyday behavior — going to the same cafes and schools and bars (at the same time of day) and talking about the same topics in their tags. (And, of course, alerting advertisers if you're the type of person who drinks a lot of coffee, as evidenced by your daily route.)
Altman calls this the "life graph" — the lattice of invisible geodata you produce every day as your phone leaves trails through the digital ether
Geo-apps face one big technological hurdle, though: Most phones do not allow an app to constantly check its location — every minute, say — in part because that constant pinging would drain the mobile's battery. They thus require you to pull out your phone and look at it, and many people find this onerous (or simply forget to do it regularly).
Assuming those tech hurdles can be overcome in the next few years, many geo-app makers envision physical space marked up with interesting information that actively pops up when you walk past a particular location.
In the long run, we could find ourselves living in a world where long, threaded discussions and conversations occur not only on blog postings or Facebook status updates but in specific cafes, public buildings, or rooms.
Granted, the privacy aspects of geodata are hair-raising. Many of these new apps intend to monetize their service by helping advertisers target you based on where you go — using your "life graph", as it were, to sell you things. Geo-enhanced advertising is likely to be something potentially useful — and annoying and occasionally unsettling — as Google's ads keyed to your search queries and e-mails.
Ted Morgan, the CEO of Skyhook — a company that maps out WiFi signals worldwide, to help phones pinpoint their location — thinks the way geotagging really changes life is by becoming part of everything: All Tweets, all Facebook entries, all MySpace posts, all news items become automatically marked up with geographic data. What will that do? He's not sure. But then again, nobody predicted social networking, either.
"You're going to see some Mark Zuckerberg guy come out with an idea that nobody could foresee," he predicts.
The original post over at Wired
Clive Thompson's Blog "Collision Detection"
