Geomicroblogging, Buzzword or Reality?

An anonymous reader writes "The iPhone 3G and Android devices are coming this year, opening the mobile world for rich applications, while sites like Fire Eagle and byNotes are ready to move your blogging habits into the geospatial world. Are we going to watch the next boom when those devices and geospatially enabled sites get combined? Sure, the posibilities this would open are endless, but are users going to embrace these services?" I don't see how it can't change the world ... it has 'Micro' and 'Blog' in the name, and I'll always know where I was when I twittered to tell everyone I was in the john.

Comments

Re:To answer the Headline:

[Anonymous Coward]

Key word in there is VOLUNTARY...

Re:To answer the Headline:

[dreamchaser]

You beat me to it. There is a world of difference between voluntarily giving your position and other information about you and your current activities, and the Government of Industry tracking your position and other information about your activities without the ability to opt out.

That being said, I'm not interested. If I want people to know where I am going to be I'll tell them if they need to know, not post it or have some 'micro blog' tracking my every move. I don't need to blog it or broadcast it. Maybe I am showing my age but I am really finding all of this stuff to be getting increasingly silly.

We have lots of words for the same things

[Cathoderoytube]

A good example is the word 'stupid'
Just off the top of my head I can think of quite a few synonyms

Idiot
Moron
Nitwit
Simpleton
Asinine
Fool
Jackass
Rum-dumb
Dense
Oaf
Thick
Unintelligent
Witless
Geomicroblogging

Re:To answer the Headline:

[Kelbear]

I'd say there's an important difference in there. If person A wants to take a part of their personal life and make it public, that's up to them. The problem is when person A wants to keep something private and entity B decides that person A doesn't have a say in the matter.

Re:Next greatest blogging product!

[Gat0r30y]

simply get aLife

But will I have to leave my mom's basement?

I can't wait to blog from the summit of Everest!

[elrous0]

I mean, why enjoy the peacefulness of nature or the majestic view when I could be tapping away on a fucking keyboard?

Other applications...

[GWLlosa]

There are other people who care nothing about this 'twitter-micro-geo-blogging' phenomenon who are looking forward to this technology. For starters, you install some crap on your kid's phone, and it lets you live-track where he is, and emails you every time that little SOB hits 90 in YOUR car...

Re:To answer the Headline:

[R2.0]

"I'd say there's an important difference in there. If person A wants to take a part of their personal life and make it public, that's up to them. The problem is when person A wants to keep something private and entity B decides that person A doesn't have a say in the matter."

I think what the GP had in mind were not those people who are concerned about vountary vs. involuntary exposure, but the situation where a person wants their information to be concealed from only SOME people - eg. getting upset at employers who read Facebook profiles. Folks now have wider circles of people they are comfortable sharing privledged information with, but still don't want that information known by specific others. So where once a "secret" was information shared by a small number of trusted people, now we have information that is to be HIDDEN from a small number of UNTRUSTED people. This is a patent impossibility, but still people expect to be able to do it.

My wife is a substitute teacher, and got a Facebook profile and added her nieces and nephews as friends. And now she knows to within a few days the exact time that one of them lost her virginity. How on EARTH she expected to keep that information from her family, while simultaneously allowing access to everyone who wanted to be her "friend" is beyond me, but I do know that she wanted it kept secret - her profile page was sanitized shortly after my wife joined.

Shill

[s.d.]

I wonder if the anonymous submitter works for Fire Eagle or byNotes, since there's no content to this story but saying how these sites are going to change the world.

It's not that simple

[D.McGuiggin]

What happens when a large number of people who are either directly or indirectly associated with you begin volunteering information that they don't know/think encroaches on your privacy, and may not actually encroach on your privacy, but when aggregated, gives a clear picture of activities that you'd like to avoid making public?

Re:I think we're headed for another dark ages

[dreamchaser]

No, your parents actually talked to real people, their friends, neighbors, relatives, etc. Word of mouth was literally word of mouth then, and guess what? They didn't always *have* to visit an eatery to see if it was good or not. They could often find that out from someone they knew and trusted rather than some anonymous author of a review on a website.

It is entirely your fault and it *was* a conscious decision. Don't bemoan your choices; either embrace them or change them.

Let me get this straight...

[Relic of the Future]

So we've put all this effort into all this technology to make the world a "smaller" place; to make every bit of information reachable and searchable from everywhere; to make location, distance, space itself, as irrelevant as possible; and somehow the idea of going back and tying information to a physical location is suppose to be... good?

Maybe I'm just misunderstanding the point?

Dear Sir,

[Cajun Hell]

No one in their right mind would give a flying shit what I waste all of my time on.

I see you are a coffee-drinker. Please accept this coupon for 50 cents off your next coffee, good at the Harbucks at the corner of nth and xth street, which you walk by every day at 7:52am.

Seriously, did you know MySpace uses the crap people put on their profiles, to select the ads to show to those people? Every bit of seemingly-useless crap you spew, can be used somehow.

Re:To answer the Headline:

[Dogtanian]

My wife is a substitute teacher, and got a Facebook profile and added her nieces and nephews as friends. And now she knows to within a few days the exact time that one of them lost her virginity. How on EARTH she expected to keep that information from her family, while simultaneously allowing access to everyone who wanted to be her "friend" is beyond me, but I do know that she wanted it kept secret - her profile page was sanitized shortly after my wife joined.

And this includes two reasons why Facebook could soon be jumping the shark if it hasn't already.

Firstly, the inherent problem with social networking sites of managing your different groups of friends and keeping them separate (assuming you know how to do so) gets to be more hassle than it's worth as (a) your groups of friends and (b) the amount of people using social networking in general grow. (This wasn't my idea, but the person who came up with it pinpointed the "more hassle than it's worth" saturation point as the reason for CB radio's downfall).

Secondly, the "everyone's using it including your [from a kids/teenage point of view] parents' generation" factor is going to rob it of most of its coolness. Not that this guarantees its downfall; it does depend on how large a factor coolness vs. social usefulness plays however (and how willing people are to switch).

Remember 13375p34k? Used to be everywhere on the net? I realised recently that I'd barely seen any of it in the past couple of years- not since around the time that newspapers started printing guides explaining those strange words your children type.

Coincidence? Hmm...