Ok, first of all… that was a lot of reading. But I enjoyed it. I found all of the articles you posted on the blog to be highly informative, especially the Tomi Ahnoen article and the blog post about the failure of meetro.
I think that the problems facing LBS (as they call it) are fascinating, and while I tend to side with Tomi Ahnoen to say that purely locative based services will not be able to achieve commercial success… i would add a large caveat to that. UNTIL… location based services start to becomes socially accepted and widely used. and IF… that ever happens. I’m not sure people are comfortable with the concept of constant location. Perhaps one of the reasons people don’t like using GPS enabled applications is that it reminds them that the same technologies can be used for surveillance.
I also had a brain flash. Tomi talks about the fundamental use of LBS is to get ‘found’… which is the paradigm most people are working under, which is problematic, as Tomi says, because we aren’t often lost in the first place, and when we are, it is often by choice and we don’t even want to be ‘found’ or ‘located’.
But perhaps a much better use of LBS would be to enable the user to get ‘lost’ in the first place. I think the LBS application that has appealed to me the most is a restaurant (yes i know, always with the restaurant) finder which is locatively aware. You input the type of cuisine you want, the desired price range, or leave it up to the app. Then you shake your iPhone (the presence of physical interaction with the app is also interesting) and the app spits out a semi random restaurant near to you that meets you specs. This results in a exploration and discovery of restaurants in your neighborhood that you have never been to before. It allows you to get ‘lost’ in your own neighborhood, to break out of you routines and patterns and go somewhere new that you haven’t visited before.
Also, I found the academic reading to be fairly standard, although I actually found some substance this week. The concept of the ‘grey area’, the fringe, the space between space and motion and everything. I’m not sure I fully understand it, perhaps it would help if I had done some of the readings that the author was referencing, but as much as I love Foucault, I can only read so much before my brain explodes.
