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.
Back in March of this year I wrote about deliberately tracking my journey by using Google's Latitude and unexpectedly tracking the same journey by looking at the history of my Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins.
By using the history function from Google Latitude I was able to put together a quick and dirty visualisation of the locations I'd been to but my check-in history added not only the location but also the place that was at each location.
During last week's Geo-Loco conference in San Francisco, Fred Wilson (no, not the guy from the B-52's) mentioned that you could feed your Foursquare check-in history into Google Maps and produce another quick and dirty visualisation of not only the places you'd checked into but also where those places were.
In the midst of yesterday's I/O event, Google announced the launch of the long rumoured API for their Latitude location sharing platform; there's ample coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb and on TechCrunch and that's just fine because that's not what I want to write about.
When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.
I've been tracking my journeys again and in doing so appear to have discovered the secret of near instantaneous trans Atlantic travel. Apart from the sporadic bad GPS locks, watch as I travel from home to the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale California and manage to travel from Heathrow to San Francisco in a blink of an eye.
It's all an optical illusion of course, revealed if you watch the timer in the top left hand corner jump from around 11.30 AM to 3.00 PM; due to the lack of Latitude updates whilst I'm in the air.
I've been tracking my journey and in doing so inadvertently uncovered a sea change in the way in which we view the whole thorny issue of location tracking.
Yesterday, Ed Parsons and I drove from London to Nottingham and back to attend the one day Supporting the Contextual Footprint event run by the Horizon Digital Economy Research institute at the University of Nottingham and I had Google Latitude running on my BlackBerry, with location history enabled, as I usually do.
Using the pre smartphone, pre GPS, pre Latitude method of writing it down, the journey went something like this:
Longitude and latitude have been formally used as a geographic coordinate system offset from the Greenwich Meridian since the International Meridian Conference of 1884 in Washington D.C.
As a spatial coordinate system, longitude (abbreviated as φ, or phi) and latitude ( λ, or lambda) work very well in defining a point on the surface of the Earth. But to gain further meaning from a long/lat pair you either need some clever algorithmics or you need to plot the long/lat point on a map which even then will yield information only as good as that which is rendered on the map itself.
Which is why I think identifier systems, such as Yahoo's WOEID, add so much value. A WOEID adds a linked web of rich metadata, describing not only a point with a long/lat centroid, but also reinforces the concept of a place, with neighbouring and hierarchical relationships.
Coordinates describe the where of a place, identifiers such as WOEIDs describe the how of a place but both conveniently (in a slight embarrassed, foot shuffling short of way) overlook the when of a place.
Telematics, the use of GPS and mobile technology within the automotive business, and the Web 2.0, neo and paleo aspects of location have traditionally carved parallel paths, always looking at if they would converge but somehow never quite making enough contact to cross over.
But not any more.The combination of 3G mobile communications and GPS enabled smart-phones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry means that one way or another, the Internet and the Web are coming into the car, either in your pocket or into the car itself.
A product launch from Google is accompanied by a massive media campaign that reaches far beyond the techy demographic; Google is a consumer brand these days and their messaging generates headlines in both traditional and new media. This is a good thing; right?
It's certainly high profile messaging, Ted Dziuba writing in the UK based Register with less than his usual profanity laden prose, first brought the term Googasm to my attention and the recent launch of Google Latitude certainly has all the hallmarks of Googasm, but this has rapidly turned into an inverse Googasm of shrill, rhetoric laden, fin de siecle doom with the BBC commencing and London's Metro newspaper going way overboard.
