Dual Perspectives Article

Description

When Sam Altman visits New York, he's never alone for very long. Altman is the 24-year-old CEO of Loopt, a company that makes a "location-aware" app for mobile phones that tracks where all of your friends are and what they're doing.

"I'll pull it out on the ride in from the airport, and before I've even gotten to the city I'll have figured out who's nearby me, and we'll be making plans to get together that night," Altman told me. If he looks on his phone's map on a Saturday night, he can literally see groups forming in real time. "It's getting to the point now where if you want do something social, you have all this information about the world around you," he says.

Location-based applications are quickly becoming the hot new thing on phones. Since many mobiles today — most particularly the iPhone — can determine their location via GPS chips (or pinging local cell towers and WiFi signals), they're spawning a whole new ecosystem of apps. There are social ones like Loopt or foursquare, which track the movement of friends as well as find-stuff tools like Yelp that locate top-rated bars and restaurants near you. According to web-research firm Compete, one in three mobile-phone owners uses location-based tools, and the number of apps has exploded from 500 to 2,500 since last October.

Yet this new class of information tool violates everything we normally think about the internet.

The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down.

Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction — because your location becomes most important thing about you. So how is the return of geography going to change our lives?

Original URL

http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_web_wired0630

http://www.wired.com/dualperspectives/article/news/2009/06/dp_web_wired0630