Net Sticky Notes All Over London

An anonymous reader writeswith a link to a BBC story which mentions in passing the Urban Tapestries project for distributed, collaborative location-based note-taking, excerpting "In practice this means giving people a specially-equipped mobile phone that allows them to wander around central London and leave virtual notes for other people to read by writing them on the phone and then 'sticking' them to a building. It works because the position of each phone is constantly tracked so when a note is written the place can be noted - when someone else goes to the same place, they can read the note."

Comments

Geocaching

[Nighttime]

Isn't this similar to geocaching? Previous /. stories here, here and here.

The official Geocaching website.

Re:Geocaching

[toesate]

Isn't this similar to geocaching?

Well, technically, there is a different -

1. Geocaching is primarily GPS based, and locating position with the help of satellites that provides longitude and latitude coordinates, and is very accurate.

   This Urban Tapestries is GSM/GPRS based, using a mobile phone, locating a position with the help of surrounding mobile phone base stations. The accuracy of a position is dependent on the site topology, and could be anywhere around 10-50 meters radius in urban context, for example.

Application wise, I think each serve slightly different purpose too -

1. Geocaching requires the seeker to actively seek the cache, and is primarily hobby based.

2. Urban Tapestries will probably do a information push when one is within a vincinity, and may not require one to actively seek it, except to give Urban Tapstries permission to push. This also means that it could be subscription based.

Theoretically, it could be possible to use geocaching caches(it's data) in GSM environment. However, the geocaching cache's seeker will probably have a harder time, as the cache will be very hard to find.

geonotes

[neodym]

There is (was?) a project at KTH/SiCS in stockholm with a similar concept called GeoNotes. This link is unfortunately not working right now, here is a description of the concept.

Prior art

[Mr_Silver]

Something similar was trialled a couple of years ago called "Mobile Grafitti" which basically worked the same way. You could write and "drop" messages anywhere and then others could pick them up.

Unfortunately it got canned early on for several reasons, one was that locations were rather broad which meant that often the note made no sense as it covered a wide area and secondly because it was abused chronically.

Re:Sort of like Usenet overlaid on the world

[Deagol]

I remember during the dot-bomb boom, there was some dude who was working on this product that plugged into your web browser. It was supposed to be the "next big thing" and he made some ungodly sum of money from selling it.

Anyway, if you had the plugin, you could place a post-it style note onto web pages you visited. And people who had the same plugin could see it when they visited it. Seemed a sorta novel idea -- but one which was ripe for abuse (by users and advertisers alike). This cell phone concept sounds just like it.

I remember the particular article because I think the writer said there were either lawsuits already pending (even though the product hadn't really gone "gold" yet) or at least threats of lawsuits. Heaven forbid some disgruntled consumer taint a dot-com brand by placing "The widgets sold here suck ass!" notes on a vendor's web site.

In any case, I never heard of the product again (kinda like Pointcast). Probably best, but I still wonder what the name of the software was, who was the person who came up with it, and what happened to it.