A blog about location aware services, cloud architecture, mobile applications development on the iPhone, G1, Palm Pre, whatever, plus traveling, microblogging, and other random musings from developers building some secretly cool stuff

Today news broke that a new alliance to share location across multiple services appeared on the various tech sites. Of course within the techcrowd, anything “open” is cool: open source, openid, etc so I guess open location must be the next cool thing. Most who know me well, know that I’m betting a lot on the capability and consumer uptake of LBS as a whole, so one would naturally think, I’d be loving this Open Sharing of Location Based Objects Alliance business. But I’m underwhelmed here.

The thing is Location Based Services (which I’m broadly including location based social networks within) are so bleeding edge that I’m not convinced that a consortium of startups (with the exception of powerhouse wayn) is going to lead to much. I mean I have to applaud for Aka-Aki, Belysio, Buddycloud, Locle, Moximity, Nulaz, Rummble, Skout, Tooio and WAYN for all playing nicely in the sandbox. But heck these guys don’t even have a website for the initiative yet so maybe the announcement was premature. Or maybe it was just a crafty way for the startups to get some publicity.

If Google (with Latitude) or Yahoo (with Fireeagle) get involved things may change and certainly in the future as we see more divergent uses of location, then an alliance of sharing data makes sense. But for the shortterm most users will apply location awareness in a similar way and are not likely to take the need/data across multiple (similar/competitive) LBS companies.

I’m all for open, and in the longrun this same play could get interesting, but at present, well, nothing to see here…move along.

Source
directionsmag Techcrunch VentureBeat

(one of the original “offending” images)

So for those of you who werent aware, Google got sued in May 2007 for its super cool streetview project. Of course like any dominate company Google gets sued all the time, though I found this one a bit interesting as it touches on privacy issues in an always on, location aware web world.  As the Internet is in a major evolutionary step as we speak - moving from a sort of virtual world, to one that augments the real world - more and more real world privacy issues will come up.

In this case a couple in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania wanted $25,000 from Google because of the “mental suffering involved” when Google indexed pictures of their home (which is located on a private road), and made them available on Google maps and other apps for all to see (obviously without the couple’s permission).  While I personally think the whole “I want 25k for mental suffering” bit is crazy, I also am sensitive to the fact that not everyone is comfortable with total physical transparency in the completely public virtual web world. And in that sense Google’s response to the claim that with “satellite technology complete privacy no longer exists” is a very non reassuring answer for a “do no evil” company (even the answer  is true, legally speaking).

At any rate it seems there was little surprise in the case (even if it did drag on for awhile) as most legal tech experts figured it would get thrown out, and that’s exactly what the judge did.  While, the legality of it is no longer in question it still remains to be seen how much we the consumers are willing to give up our own privacy for the sake of exciting technological advances.

I personally have mixed feelings.  How about you?

Sources: cnet newtechnologydirectory ericgoldman corank

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So we are building something.  I guess we are always building something.  But the thing is we’ve already built this one thing and now we’ve begun building this massively cooler other thing thats in someways the same and other ways totally different.  For the past few months we’ve just been in the cave building it.  But now it’s gotten far enough along that we can pull our heads up and blog a little here and there.

I give you fair warning, this blog is likely to be pretty random.  Developer tech nerd stuff with some random business commentary and who knows what else.  It will probably become a little more focused as we come towards launch and start talking about company and product type stuff but for now, well, whatever.