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(Source; http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/most-exciting-part-of-web-isnt-world-w... )
The world wide web removed a sense of space from our lives by connecting everyone on the globe to the same content — totalitarian regimes excepted. But the web’s most promising developments of late indicate that we’re entering a new phase where place matters as much as reach.
Perhaps there is a “there” here after all, in other words, to corrupt Gertrude Stein’s infamous aphorism. Craigslist, Citysearch, and other veterans have long profited from acknowledging that web surfers live in geographic locations, but only recently has the shift from globalization to localization become a major driver of innovation.
Witness the ongoing rise of the New York company Foursquare, whose primary purpose is to tell people where you are. The service added its millionth user in April and was used by the Wall Street Journal to spread news about the attempted Times Square bombing, proving that it’s not just about becoming the mayor of your local coffee shop.
After Entrepreneur named Foursquare the “most brilliant” idea in mobile technology earlier this month, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley said even his team is surprised by the way it continues to grow, over a year after its launch at SXSW 2009.
“Every month, we look at the numbers and think we can’t keep growing at this rate,” said Crowley. “But we do. This thing’s got legs.”
Foursquare requires checking in to locations, but Google Latitude does away with that nicety and broadcasts your location to your friends at all times through your phone. Now that the iPhone supports multitasking, it and other apps that broadcast location passively have the potential to work there, too, providing location-tracking apps with a significant boost.
In other local news, one of the largest providers of ISP routers in the world plans to tag users with anonymous, zip+4 codes so that advertisers can advertise to them locally (or by targeting hundreds of specific neighborhoods nationwide) — even if they’re visiting a general interest website. Our photos and tweets are part of this trend too.
Geo-tagging technology stamps the location where a photo was taken or a tweet was written, forever binding that piece of media to a specific location, so nearby users can access them easily. Flickr was an early supporter of geo-tagging, and as the equipment we use to take photos and send tweets increasingly includes location-aware connectivity if not outright GPS, the trend is set to explode.
Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/06/most-exciting-part-of-web-isnt-world-w...
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