Discoverability
Having just read Franz Dill’s posting (Future Now) about YellowArrow, it occurs to me that discoverability is a crucial and subtle locative concept.
Due to its technical limitations, the current breed of SMS mobile social toys needs you to be explicit in order to understand your current spatial context. Sites like dodgeball rely on the user to provide this info (ie. @myDiveBar), before querying a database to find one’s GPS coordinates and close-by friends.
Once GPS becomes pervasive on all cell phones, the previously manual “I am here” becomes a passive sequence of pings to whatever services you subscribe to. But how do you specify what you’re seeking? And how do you describe who knows about you?
Let’s define one’s “discoverability footprint” as a spatial and temporal description of what you can find and who can find you. The latter should satisfy those who have misgivings about the privacy implications for locative technologies.
I imagine an interface in which you could filter:
- topic - ie. jazz club with food
- groups - a la Yahoo Groups to limit your audience. ie. “ny nightlife list”
- direction - ie. only in the direction I am heading (with SMS, one would need to manually enter “North”; with GPS technology, it’s a no brainer). You could make your location or annotations known to people walking away from you (or where you have been)
- pattern - ie. 2 blocks to my right or left….or within 1 square mile northwest, except any areas discouraged by the neighborhood crime web service
- time - ie. after 8pm on a weekday. I envision this as a knob-style widget, where you can turn it like a radio tuner to find the right frequency. A physical knob feels intuitively like the right way to go.
The optimal discoverability interface will be a mix of useful hardware and software. Maybe a bunch of generic phycical knobs, levers and buttons which can be programmed and customized for the locative task at hand.
