locative media is here

I’ve been playing with version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware for a few hours already and am impressed.

For too long, locative media has been deferred into the near future, but now, overnight everything changed: a widely-used handheld platform can deliver a large (and growing) array of information swiftly and efficiently (yelp, hotels.com, and even the yellow pages can do this now). Some of this information (such as the nearpics application that draws on photographs at panoramio) is even user-uploaded.

Now secondary questions arise: is this kind of information going to be limited to walled gardens within individual applications or will developers find ways of exchanging this information between databases (as openid promises for identity). Is this kind of interaction between informatic and physical space a minor tweak of an existing relationship to networkedpublics.org/book/place or is it something else entirely? What sort of radical applications can this platform spawn?

I’ve been playing with version 2.0 of the iPhone firmware for a few hours already and am impressed.

For too long, locative media has been deferred into the near future, but now, overnight everything changed: a widely-used handheld platform can deliver a large (and growing) array of information swiftly and efficiently (yelp, hotels.com, and even the yellow pages can do this now). Some of this information (such as the nearpics application that draws on photographs at panoramio) is even user-uploaded.

Now secondary questions arise: is this kind of information going to be limited to walled gardens within individual applications or will developers find ways of exchanging this information between databases (as openid promises for identity). Is this kind of interaction between informatic and physical space a minor tweak of an existing relationship to networkedpublics.org/book/place or is it something else entirely? What sort of radical applications can this platform spawn?