(Blog)

I said recently that I thought 2007 could be the year of location-based services. But, after reading this WIRED article on O’Reilly Media’s Where 2.0 conference, I think it might just come even sooner. It started with numerous “mashup” websites, mixing up Google Maps with other sites’ data feeds to provide new and novel functionality, such as the ability to plot real-estate listings within a Google map, or the ability to embed the latitude/longitude or zip code of a photograph within Flickr’s tags, and then use these to plot them on a Google map.

Now that we’re getting used to having the ability to annotate online maps with all sorts of data from different sources, including our own personal information, the idea of mapping mashups is beginning to evolve into something more. We’re beginning to see that we can “tag” not only websites and news articles, but space and time. Before I could take a photo to share a memory, but now I can actually map that photograph and include a snippet of information, and remember when and where a certain event happened.

In the future, as more sophisticated technologies trickle down to the average Joe, we could find that the idea of augmented reality will become commonplace. That is, at a point in the future, I will be able to walk around with my GPS-enabled mobile phone and Wi-Fi-enabled digital camera and when I snap a picture, instantly pass it via peer-to-peer Wi-Fi to my phone, where the GPS location will be written to the file, and then upload it to Flickr with the phone’s cellular data, geotag information included. That’s something you could hack together today, but I see a consumer-friendly turnkey solution coming very, very soon. We’ll look back not being able to track our journeys minute-by-minute on a map as something positively primitive.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, though. Imagine walking through Los Angeles and receiving anything from restaurant listings to traffic information to photographs to personal stories in real-time depending on your exact location. Today, you can do that while sitting at a computer through a mapping mashup. Tomorrow, you’ll do it while walking around staring at your phone or PDA or whatever they’ll call it, making the information infinitely more relevant and meaningful.

In short, we’re fast reaching a turning point where the idea of adding metadata to something will escape the confines of the computer or even the internet into the real, tangible world. It’s hard to imagine the depth of relevant information this will bring into our lives, but it’s obvious that we could be entering an era of connectedness that will make the current iteration of the internet seem almost childlike in comparison.

When everyone has internet-connected phones in their pockets at all times, the internet will supersede the real world. It’s exciting, and kind of scary.