CommunityWalk is another in the long line of collaborative atlases. This is obviously going to be a hot topic area, and one we’ll be covering at Where 2.0. Whoever wins this space will get a huge pile of user data, the way Gracenote (aka CDDB) did. The LBS and geospatial industries are data-based, so this user data could conceivably be quite valuable.
In particular, Where 2.0 will address the pitfalls, which CommunityWalk and others aren’t addressing:
- Privacy and security (is Wikipedia-style security enough when we’re talking about the real-life locations of real people?)
- Differentiation
- Ease of use (user interfaces on maps are not trivially easy)
- Useful metadata (if you sell the data to in-car nav systems, they’ll want to know how to tell apart the places that people love and the places where people make love)