Location, Location, Innovation!
Close friends: Google's Latitude service allows friends to share their location and status
In recent years GPS has been widely adopted in car navigation systems, guiding drivers to their destinations. With mobile devices using GPS, cell tower and WiFi location, a range of interesting new social applications have recently been announced beyond the navigational. In the past week Google has introduced the Latitude service, allowing friends to share their location and status. Others include Loopt and Brightkite. In today’s blog I’d like to think about services like these and social applications of location technologies.
As these new services emerge we can look back at the experiences of earlier work in this space. One playful example is that of Geocaching; a kind of treasure-hunt where people seek hidden containers or caches, at published locations, which has developed a large on-line community. Another is Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, which allowed people to hide secrets around a city, that others may stumble upon. BT’s research project Elevate, also allows users to contribute located user-generated content for public consultation, on an urban renewal plan.
As we have seen these social applications become ever more useful as a crowd gathers around it. As it will be here, where friends introduce each other to a service. ZoneTag from Yahoo Research demonstrates the power of a network of users, to suggest descriptive tags for geotagged photographs. As there is a good deal of agreement on points for photographs, particularly around tourist spots, the chances are that someone will have taken a shot from a similar position before and the words they used to describe it will be good suggestions to tag your photo. The question is of course how a new service grows in popularity to this point.
This same technology can not only tell us about the local environment, but also allow our devices to adapt to the context in which they operate. For Nathan Eagle’s PhD thesis on Reality Mining, he equipped one hundred MIT students with mobile telephones that were aware of their location, the identity of devices around them, as well as the calls and messages made; for a period of eight months. From this Nathan could predict where a user was likely to be next and with whom, given their current location and those of their friends.
It is clear that will have to wait to see how these technologies are adopted and made sense of; addressing the evitable privacy and social issues that arise. As the mobile telephone already allows us to make far more ad hoc arrangements, “give me a call when you’re near”, I think these location services continue that trend. Arriving unprepared in a strange town becomes far less daunting, when your mobile device provides access to local hotels and restaurants, with user-contributed reviews. Will these technologies make us all more spontaneous and unplanned? Is this a good thing?
