|
|
|||||
Location in the Cloud (Part 2)Social Location in the Cloud Part one of this two-part series on Location in the Cloud covered Wireless Location in the Cloud, noting that after ten years of wireless carrier control, it’s now finally possible to pull down the location of any mobile phone or connected machine-to-machine device from US wireless carrier clouds through mobile location aggregation services such as Veriplace. In a tweet from the floor of Where 2.0, Tim O’Reilly said Veriplace's service is "the inverse of knowing where your phone is--an outside-in approach--supporting all phones beyond Smartphones." Building on his description, the other perhaps more popular "inside-out" check-in approach, which I call Social Location in the Cloud, leverages local smartphone location smarts on iPhone and Android to publish location data up and over-the-top of carrier pipes to Social Nets and Web services, where the data is often accessible via APIs for additional development. The check-in way of doing mobile location on the Web is crowded and without a clear leader. SimpleGeo, who used Where 2.0 as a launch pad, showcased a SXSW spatiotemporal time lapse highlighting various check-in services. The animation reveals a check-in silo situation similar to the wireless carrier location data islands prior to aggregation services such as Veriplace. The difference however is there are only a handful of wireless carriers, but an ever-growing list of smartphone apps on virtual shelf-spaces stocked by abundant app choice which will inevitably lead to even more check-in fragments of mobile location available on the Web, therefore building a good case for a check-in Social Location in the Cloud aggregation service similar to Veriplace. Check-in Buzz Foursquare, Gowalla, and others fueled a mobility and mobile location buzz at Where 2.0 and in the larger Web and Geo communities now including mainstream social media circles. Google’s VP of Geo Products John Hanke said "the check-in had energized the conference." During his talk, Othman Laraki, Director of Geo at Twitter validated the energy and said he wants to a) create a frictionless way for people to associate context to tweets, and b) allow users or developers to consume real-time information based on context. Longer term ambitions include associating tweets in context with other hyperlocal descriptive semantic naming conventions and geographic boundaries, plus deriving new geodata from harvested clusters of tweets defining social and cultural neighborhoods from recurring geographic name mentions. In his on-stage interview with Yelp's Jeremy Stoppelman, Brady Forrest's utterance "...you're also doing check-ins?" and his subtle but poignant follow-on, "a feature is a feature," sums up the current state of the check-in--a simple feature--now becoming common attribution to most social updates. From what I've seen over time, most mobile location technologies, apps, and services eventually become features of larger core offerings, and I struggle to imagine immunity for the check-in. Combining Wireless and Social Location Facebook's Engineering Manager of Mobile, Dave Fetterman, cited scale and subscriber reach as main objectives in bridging the Web and mobile divide as part of Facebook's mobile priorities. While smartphone touch experiences offer one high-end mode to interact and publish contextual status updates, Fetterman said in clear and no uncertain terms "the meaty middle" using lower common denominator modes such as SMS and the mobile Web are as core to Facebook's focus as interactive touch experiences, validating a need for a combined approach using both smartphone check-ins and wireless location services such as those offered by Veriplace. Beyond a need to combine these disparate approaches, I also wonder how much longer will it be before larger social nets such as Facebook develop their own check-in capabilities for touch experiences. A feature is a feature. Bringing Communities Together Inspiration to write this two-part series theme of Wireless Location in the Cloud and Social Location in the Cloud originate from my own ongoing restless thoughts and validation from a Directions Media Joe Francica interview with O'Reilly's Brady Forrest. In his interview, Brady discussed O'Reilly's historical role bringing together yesteryear disconnects between neogeography and GIS communities. Similar disconnects exist today for both Wireless Location in the Cloud and Social Location in the Cloud approaches to enablement. My hope is the two find common ground in a fraction of the time, and yet another new contextual mobility "feature" wins highlight exposure next year. Spatiotemporal mobility analysis as a service would be hot!
|
|||||
© 2012, O'Reilly Media, Inc. (707) 827-7019(800) 889-8969 All trademarks and registered trademarks appearing on oreilly.com are the property of their respective owners. |
|||||
Comments: 1
Julian Bond [ 5 April 2010 08:04 AM]
Please see http://www.google.com/buzz/julian.bond/1NbVjNMe92j/Why-location-is-currently-broken-After-SXSW-were
This is a young(ish) field but I'm terribly frustrated by it at the moment. Here's the bullet list:-
- Desktop browsers that don't support geolocation using the HTML5 API.
- Almost no laptops with GPS or 3G built in.
- Apps that have a mobile UI but no equivalent desktop UI.
- Apps that only work on the iPhone and not other phones that have location support.
- Launching as USA Only.
- Launching using the city paradigm and then only for a small number of cities.
- Apps that default location to off.
- Apps that pay only the most cursory attention to privacy.
- Apps where you can only pick from a fixed list of nearby locations and not add your own or adjust your position.
- Apps that only allow you to check in where you are right here, right now.
- And most of all, Apps that take too many clicks, mouse movements or whatever to check in.
- Not everyone wants to play a game. Some people just want to tell their friends and business colleagues where they are.
- Apps that have an API but no UI. Or a write API but no read API.
- Apps that have location support but have no RSS-Atom feed that contains the location data.
- A lack of integration between systems via (say) RSS/atom.