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I wanted to make sure that everyone knows about this weekend’s mapping party activities brought to you by the OpenStreetMap project. Here’s the cliff notes version:
You can find many more details in the Silicon Florist post on the topic. Have fun!
I’m a huge fan of xkcd, and today’s comic does a great job of illustrating why we designed Shizzow to require that you shout your location rather than automating the process.
Brady also has an interesting take on this issue over on the O’Reilly Radar blog.
“I am personally looking forward to these services becoming ubiquitous so that I can track my location and aspects of my life, but as they currently stand these services are not poised for mainstream adoption. They need to do more to prevent people from embarrassing or endangering themselves.”
Quoted from XKCD on the Future Self.
Remember to shout responsibly, people. There are some things that I just don’t want to know about you!
I’ve been seeing more and more articles about location applications and interesting uses of GPS technologies lately, and I really think that 2009 will be the year that many of these applications move into the mainstream. People are moving onto smarter phones, like the iPhone and Android devices, that use GPS data seamlessly in applications.
I also ran across an interesting article from Wired this morning: Inside the GPS Revolution: 10 Applications That Make the Most of Location. It looks at a bunch of less well known applications used on phones to locate police traps, wake you from a nap at your train stop, play location games, adjust phone settings based on location, and more. I was a little sad not to see IceCondor on the list, but the Wired article still covered some interesting applications.
Now that we have a beta version of the Shizzow API out, I am anxious to see how people use location data, GPS, and other technologies in applications that interface with Shizzow.
Michael Calore talked about how location-based information is becoming a requirement for web applications in a recent Wired article:
In 2008, location-based information ceased being a fancy add-on and instead became a requirement of any serious, successful web service.
Hit a button on your laptop or phone to tell a web service where you are, and it tells you what restaurants are close by, where the new Bond movie is playing (and when, and if there are tickets left), and which of your friends are within shouting distance if you need a date.
(Quoted from Wired News)
Mobile devices with GPS, Geode, and location applications have become more prolific in 2008, and we expect this trend to continue in 2009 making location-based services even more important.
We have big plans for Shizzow in 2009 to take advantage of this trend. We’ve been pretty quiet in December, but only because we have been hard at work behind the scenes. The API is being completed, and code is being refactored to make room for the API, which should be ready for beta testers in the next week or so. We have plenty of ideas for applications that will use the API to make it easier to shout from your iPhone / desktop and ideas for integrations with other applications.
Leave a comment here if you are interested in using the API to develop applications for Shizzow.
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the importance of context in applications dealing with location. Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist at Intel, mentioned something similar in her recent keynote at OSCON. She said, “adding data is not the same as adding context.” The following snippet from an Intel blog post outlines the idea in a little more detail.
It was a huge accomplishment to simply be able to sense location electronically. Now that we’ve done it, it is important to figure out the real context of ‘context awareness’—who needs to communicate what to whom. This is not a matter of simply adding more datapoints but creating occasions for human interpretation and interaction. (Quoted from Research@Intel)
In my experience, it seems like too many applications focus on either the location (data) or the context without a really great tie between the two.
Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point:
I publish that I am at the Peruvian restaurant, Andina. Does this mean that I’m having a romantic dinner with my sweetheart, or am I in the bar wishing someone would join me for a drink? I would want my friends to treat each of these two scenarios differently. While the location is the same, the intent and the context are very different. This is what I think of as location without context.
What about a tweet that says, “I’m at Urban Grind. Anyone want to join me for a work session?” This is a little more clear, but can be ambiguous without a precise location. Do you know if I am at the Urban Grind Coffeehouse in Portland’s Pearl District or the one in NE Portland? This is an example of context without location.
Why does this even matter?
The sweet spot for bringing people together in more meaningful ways is precise location with context for what you are doing at that location. This gives people an excuse to get together for spontaneous gathering, which is something that the Portland technology community does frequently. We’ve organized ad hoc co-working sessions, coffee, lunches, waffleups, happy hours, drunk geeking, and more. Having an easy way to provide your friends with a location and some context about what to do with that information is what makes location applications so powerful.