Chris Messina has a great post about the upcoming location-aware layer on the internet. He starts off by mainly pondering how trivial access to a person's location will change the way we design future applications. One paragraph in particular caught my eye:
If you imagine for a minute that the ubiquity of wireless-enabled laptops gave rise to the desire-slash-ability for more productive mobile work, and consequently created the opportunity for the coworking community to blossom; if you consider that the ubiquity of digital cameras and camera phones created the opening for a service like Flickr (et al) to take off; if you consider that the affordability of camcorders, accessibility of video on digital cameras, cell phones and built-in in laptops and iMacs, coupled with simpler tools like iMovie, lead to people being able and wanting to post videos to a service like YouTube (et al); if you look at how the ubiquity of some kind of device technology with [media] output lead to the rise of services/communities that were optimized for that same media, you might start to realize that a huge opportunity is coming for locative devices that make it easy to publish where you are, discover where your friends are, and to generally receive benefits from being able to inform third parties, in a facile way, where you are, where you’ve been and where you’re going.
This struck me as being similar in thought to something that that Jyri Engestrom mentioned:
Last but not least, we can use the object-centered sociality theory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for social networking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.' Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too.
Location awareness is going to quickly become very important. We're already seeing attempts at it, but most of them (I'm looking at BrightKite here, but pretty much all of them have this issue) are the equivalent of a Flickr where you have to scan your pictures in before you can upload them. The process is easy enough, but the required constant manual entry just will not work. Even typing L: (your location) into your presence notifier is too annoying, though I can see the case for privacy-centric folks preferring that method. For about a week. Before they get bored of it and never use it again. A much better approach for the privacy focused might be a method where when a service is going to ping people about your location, it will send an authorization request via sms, email, IM, whatever asking for your permission to broadcast your location (but, again, only when you would be included in the service). Then, you would show up for however long that session is - that location only for up to 12 hours, something user configurable, whatever. Of course, these are exactly the kinds of questions that Messina is talking about - these are the questions that we should start thinking about, considering how close we are to ubiquitous location information.
I'm excited. How about you?
