David Troy

Twittervision got a lot of attention, sorta explained twitter. A way to show the world in a new way. Similarly flickrvision got a lot of attention. Shown in the museum of modern art. Spinvision.tv takes youtube videos and puts onto a flash player.

Twittervision local shows more local versions, also flickrvision local coming together.

Got me thinking a lot about all this data I’ve collected, what can I do with it? Photos and tweets in a particular area. Thought about a personal tricorder to see what’s around you, scan your local area. Frankly though it was a large amount of data it wasn’t large enough. Was thinking about what else out there could help this. Too may walled gardens of people approaching this, maybe there’s a way to link this? Came up with openlocation.org.

Suppose you land in Chicago, as you’re taxiing you take out your cellphone to find out what’s happening in Chicago, are friends available, events, places you’ve been recommended to go? Only solution is to scour bunch of websites and you won’t be able to do it quick enough. You need to be able to just say “what’s up in Chicago”. Find your friends, find the bar, meet your friends, you can do all that on the way to the gate.

This is a really hard problem, I liken it to being in jail, you get one call, you need to find the information straight away. This is case where you don’t care about maps, you care about proximity.

Problem is there’s a huge amount of information. Google’s geosearch will return results based on a basic page ranking but we don’t know how that works. Maybe we need to do this based on your social graph. All this enhances quality of life, if you can take out mobile and get complete picture of your surroundings.

Maybe it’s not a business, maybe it’s a technology or a protocol. If twitter was invented in 1994 it would’ve been given a port number. So maybe this needs to be a technology or protocol. We need to look at this as not simply a business.

We’re announcing openlocation.org. A lot of developers don’t get geo. Developers will give you many different approaches. We need to start a conversation on how to approach problems and agree on toolsets. Don’t want people to try to lock up data to become the facebook of LBS.

Need to think a lot about this, how do users interact with this. Make sure it’s simple unlike OpenID(?) More like Maker Faire, less like IETF.

Need to agree on goals. Openlocation.org is a community to bridge geo community with the web. Psychology. Sometimes maps are not great. Location relationship is important. This is a hard problem that we need to iterate on.

“Wrestling with Angels!”

GeoHash, lat lon converted to hash that removes accuracy as you remove digits from the end.

Got lots of important people involved. Get on the google group and get involved.

Openlocation.org: Location Services for Web Developers

Technorati tags: openlocation, open, location, where, where2.0, where2008