⏳ Waiting for the APIs in the Cloud for what's going on right now ...
A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it's justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven't we been here before?
Let's look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.
"History is written by the victors". So goes the saying attributed to Winston Churchill sometime during his reign as British Prime Minister. I'd like to offer up a corollary to that saying, which is "History is also written by the man from the council with a tin of white paint".
I should explain.
I live in what used to be the rather grandly named Municipal Borough of Twickenham. Used to be. Twickenham as a borough was created in 1926 out of the 1868 Twickenham Local Government District. In 1934 the new borough absorbed the nearby urban districts of Hampton, Hampton Wick and Teddington. But when Greater London was created in 1965, Twickenham Borough vanished overnight, becoming part of the new London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames.
Earlier this week I was interviewed by Cian O'Sullivan for GoMo News as part of the run-up to the Location Business Summit in San Jose. The interview is now up on the GoMo News site and is reproduced here with permission.
As a race and as a society we just love our boundaries and our borders; go here, don't go here, this is yours, this is ours. We put up border controls, we tax dependent on what side of the street you live on, you need the right visa stamp in your passport to pass onto this piece of land, which looks identical to the one you're currently standing on but because of a line drawn on a map its ... different.
While lots of the animal kingdom are equally territorial, no one species has managed to invent a whole series of rules and regulations and to employe an entire bureaucracy to ensure the rules and regulations are correctly implemented and patrolled.
I've been thinking a lot about the etymology of place names recently. That's a slightly verbose way of saying that I've been thinking about the origin of place names and where they come from. Take London for example. That's pretty easy as most sources of information seem to agree that London derives from Londinium, the name of the Roman settlement from which the modern metropolis of London grew.
Then there's Teddington, the town on the River Thames at the upstream limit of the Tideway, where I currently live. Some people believe that the name derives from Tide's End Town; Rudyard Kipling was one of the people who subscribed to this version of the name's origin. Scholars though tend to believe that the town was named after a Saxon leader, called either Todyngton or Tutington, which morphed into the modern day name over the centuries.
