Still waiting 25 minutes later in a chilly, damp fog, I regretted my decision.

If I could have frozen time at that “make or break” moment, I would have:

1. Pulled out my iPhone
2. Clicked my Nextbus bookmark and navigated through no less than 4 links to find the right stop and check the arrival time of the next bus (the routesy iphone app might be faster)
3. Convinced my 2 friends to run!

In reality, that would have taken at least 2 minutes and the bus would have been long gone. So…we needed an ambient computing technology that understood my intention to catch that bus. It should deliver the “run or don’t run” response in a split-second.  Complex stuff, but a reasonable guess could be made by these tidbits of information:

• I took public transport earlier in the day to the Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park
• I just finished dinner and at 10:30 PM, was likely heading home (in fact, I told that to my wife on the phone just minutes before)
• Neither of my 2 friends had a car
• We were walking towards a popular bus route

Not sure what this ambient technology might look like, but it probably involves my phone, some communication protocol with the incoming bus, and maybe some supplied context on my part.  Probably not through high effort keyboard input, but maybe a quick voice command like “taking N-Judah home”.

I’d hope for a response like “run now! Next bus won’t arrive for 30 minutes” or maybe an orb-like display color coded with green for “take your time” or red for “run now!”.

After creating your avatar, you choose a room and populate it with furniture and gadgets including a radio streaming last.fm, artwork displaysing your flickr feed, YouTube videos or Twitter tweets, and arcade games to challenge your friends. Click on a pool table or a chess board for a quick casual game. The mashup possibilities with other popular Internet services seem endless - I’d love to see an in-game map or globe where I can pinpoint previous or future travel destinations.

But I’m most excited about how easy and natural it feels to interact with other people. The last 5 years of social networking have demonstrated a progression in interactivity. First it was your individual profile - you create a page of self-description (favorite quotes, bands, etc). Then came the testimonial or public wall where you left messages to be discovered by others trolling your page. We then graduated to the Facebook newsfeed, where you can keep tabs on your wide social circle in a less time consuming way (no need to click each profile for the latest updates).

But while a sense of community was formed, it wasn’t real time. With an avatar based paradigm like Small Worlds, it’s natural to communicate with many people in your virtual room and participate in real-time group dialog. The learning curve is much lower than Second Life, where it takes hours to acclimate.

I experienced an AHA! moment, where I envisioned myself sending friends and new contacts a URL link (all rooms have their own web addresses) instead of an email address or Linked In invite. Once clicked, they enter my room and get treated to an online representation of Me - my design aesthetic, latest ideas, projects, photos, playlists, favorite restaurants and reviews. Ringing a bell might alert me through my IM client that I have a visitor so I can open up Small Worlds in my browser and catch up, maybe inviting a few mutual friends to plan a BBQ next weekend.

We haven’t yet reached Snowcrash technology, but Small Worlds is a step closer to a web less about Me and more about Us.

And above all, what happens when the composite view we are offered of our own selves conflicts with the way we would want those selves to be perceived?

Erving Goffman taught us, way back in 1958, that we are all actors. we all have a collection of masks, in other words, to be swapped out as the exigencies of our transit through life require: one hour stern boss, the next anxious lover. who can maintain a custody of the self conscious and consistent enough to read as coherent throughout all the input modes everyware offers?

What we’re headed for, I’m afraid, is a milieu in which sustaining different masks for all the different roles in our lives will prove to be untenable, if simply because too much information about our previous decisions will follow us around. And while certain futurists have been warning us about this for years, for the most part even they hadn’t counted on the emergence of a technology capable of closing the loop between the existence of such information and its actionability in everyday life. For better or worse, everyware is that technology.

“Hyperlocality is transforming our lives at every scale: bodyware, roomware, streetware, cityware, nationware, and global ware. From nano to astro!”

Universally celebrated by both users and programmers, Facebook’s decision to open up its ecosystem to developers certainly spiced up a social network formerly known for its cool way of tagging photos. Now you can superpoke me, Flixster or Flickr, read my fortune (or horoscope), PET MY LOLCAT (PURR!), digg! me, pirate music that you iLike, and stalk me all over the globe.

And you can do all of this from your comfy 1024 x 768 pixel easy-chair, branded with that trustworthy (heck, it must be safe - your friends are all here!) blue and white Facebook design motif.

And therein lies the problem, at least with the initial batch of applications; they’re so uniform, void of individuality as they all pipe the same tune of riches through Facebook monetization (?). Some of these apps do too much, trying to recreate the well-designed functionality of their full-blown website, but tamed in an awkward foreign environment.

On one hand, I commend Facebook on the (calculated) courage it took to lead the anti-myspace dance and embrace an open platform. Their API would make any VC firm salivate since their web 2.0 investment can now interact with 25+ million users (”fantastic demographics for our advertisers!”) through special text markup and custom database queries (”FQL” makes me snicker).

However, third party applications would be better served by focusing on the golden nugget offered by Facebook, which is the “network of friends” and the viral opportunity presented by “news feeds”. If Johnny sent Sarah a free gift, it must be worth something and I must click on the free gift application and send one to Marcus right now!

Just as Twitter’s gift to the community was the text messaging infrastructure, Facebook blessed us with the social network infrastructure and viral nature easily leveraged by existing websites to drive up their page impressions.

So instead of reproducing your website’s functionality on Facebook, write a Facebook application to be a simple “dashboard”, highlighting how a user’s network of friends interacts with your website.

You might consider headings like:

• Most active friends in your network
• Recent reviews by friends in your network
• Photos (or artists or books) most popular in your network

The items under the headings would link to the appropriate page on the destination website. This way, logging onto Facebook is all about checking your friends’ updates (as usual) on your start page and then maybe clicking on a few of these (new) applications to see what your friends are watching, reading or listening to, depending on the nature of the application. The Facebook application acts as a quick preview, but if you want more detail, click a link to visit a separate website.

In effect, Facebook becomes your social aggregator - an easy to read dashboard into your friends’ lives.

This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.

Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:

• In the past 6 months, hundreds of people used their mobile device to access the network from Dolores Park. It knows this because the phone communicates the user’s GPS coordinate. Many phones already have this capability, either built in or through a bluetooth connection with a GPS.
• Whenever a member accesses the social network, it logs the time. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park occur on Sunday afternoons, between 2pm and 5pm.
• On each access, the network contacts an online weather service and logs the weather condition and temperature. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park on Sunday afternoons occur on sunny days above 65°.
• Many of these network accesses correspond to gay men between 25 and 40 years old, as specified in their user profile under “orientation” and “age”.

By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.

Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location

Instead of waiting for carriers to uniformly open up GPS triangulation to consumers through their APIs, he encouraged developers to take advantage of the falling prices of GPS components. They should consider using a pocket bluetooth GPS to interact effectively with their cell-phone hosted location-aware UGC application.

What kind of applications?

1. Identify unknown images in a photograph using historic tagged metadata. Ajit describes a related thought experiment on his blog, but the gist of it is that you can search a photo website for previous photo tags at the same location to determine blurry features in your own picture.
2. Infer memorable events by looking for data thresholds. This is a bit of a thought experiment as well and certainly unnecessary given the invention of AM radio, but hear me out. I’m not intimately familiar with Flickr’s API, but imagine the following:
   • Let’s assume we live in a world where photos are instantaneously uploaded to a photo website from a wireless capable camera.
   • You setup a location-sensitive “trigger” to send you an SMS to your cell phone Twitter-style.
   • You setup a Flickr “rule” like “Send me a text message when Flickr receives 500 photos in a 10 second interval from AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play baseball) over the next 10 days”

   You’ve just subscribed to be the first one to know when Barry Bonds beats Hank Aaron’s home run record! Furthermore, you could subscribe to the feed associated with those pictures.

   I believe that this concept is powerful and can be more generalized. I could subscribe to any Flickr photo feed when a certain threshold of pictures taken has been exceeded in a short time interval. Even if we remove that futuristic assumption that photos are immediately beamed to Flickr, the rule is still useful as long as the GPS coordinate and timestamp are preserved upon upload.

3. Integrate olfactory devices and GPS (I am half joking here). By mashing up smells and locations, one can broadcast the existence of restaurants, gas leaks, fires, etc. It sure smells like UGC

To summarize, by capturing aggregated user generated content in the form of tags, time, subject context and smell (!), we can infer potentially useful information.

• booking restaurant reservations
• golf tee-times
• hotel rooms
• inviting friends to events
• checking weather conditions
• finding interesting places nearby

Our product is called Geohana, its name inspired by taking Hana, which means “family” in Hawaiian, for a geographic spin. A central vision for Geohana is to give people tools to communicate more effectively and act socially based on their location.

You can play with Geohana right here on this blog! Check out the Geohana widget with the map on the right side of this page.

In addition to adding relevant geographic content on your website, you can also earn revenue with Geohana. By embedding Geohana on your site (with minimal javascript!), BigTribe shares commissions with you whenever a user on your site makes a restaurant reservation or a golf tee-time. We call this Geographic affiliate marketing and you can read about it at the BigTribe website.

It is easy to add a Geohana widget to your blog or website. Follow this link to customize its functionality and the way it looks. You can personalize your widget to:

• Ask the user to enter an address
• Start off with a specific address
• Display a list of your favorite locations
• Choose the location based services made available to your readers (restaurant reservations, golf tee-times, hotel rooms, weather)

If you are technically inclined, Geohana comes with a full API with which you can closely integrate Geohana web services into your page. You can build store locators and display your own location based content (reviews, ads, etc) by catching Geohana Javascript events. Check out some examples in our demo section.

My understanding is that a Twitter powered web service has potential for ideas like this:

1. Techie with too much time on their hands compiles a list of radio stations in major cities.
2. Same Techie creates a Twitter profile named “radioWTF”
3. User (with less time on their hands) sends a text message to Twitter profile radioWTF, along with a city name. Since the prefix of “d” sends a direct message, it would look something like “d radioWTF Seattle”
4. While User was frustratingly trying to compose her cryptic message using her Razr’s T9 language support, Techie wrote a server side program to parse the city in the message (in this case, Seattle) and respond with the city’s radio call signs, descriptions and frequencies.
5. Techie’s program retrieves the message (this is the new part of the API), parses it and sends the message back.
6. User scans the received message, identifies the frequency of the shock jock talk show station she has been looking for, and sets her radio accordingly.

Where does location fit in? It turns out that there is already a clever hack used by the Twittervision Google Map mashup to plot people’s locations on a map. Location is specified by a prefix of “L:” so I can send Twitter a message like “L:77.5184, 161.5574 I’m watching penguins marching in Antarctica”. For the less geo-chic inclined, zip codes and city names can be used instead of latitude and longitude.

So here is how location can get interesting once Twitter opens up its API to enable web services:

1. A crafty techie might create a profile named “geolookup”, with an associated website (www.geolookup.com) as well.
2. A Twitter user can create a separate (non-Twitter) account on www.geolookup.com and submit their Twitter credentials.
3. They might select from a list of options - radio stations, weather, events tonight, coupons, etc, and also store their default location (eg. San Francisco).
4. They save their settings and later that evening send an SMS message to the geolookup Twitter user with zipcode 94114.
5. The geolookup web service looks up the user’s account, aggregates the requested information, and sends it back to the user who can make use of the information.

By using a website (in this case www.geolookup.com) to select the kind of information (weather, radio stations, events) that might later prove useful when mobile, a single Twitter message specifying a location (and implicitly time) can return a wealth of relevant information.

While quite possibly a netiquette violation,  I’ve copied over some of my favorite posts, which explains the appearance that I overcame a nasty bout of writer’s block today with a dozen postings. I’m still playing with the layout, but this visual theme (Vistered Little) appeals to me. I plan on rotating topic-relevant background skins so readers can click on the thumbnails (top left) for a customized look.

Like the previous blog, mishmap details my thoughts and experiments related to location and technology.