A quick location flashback to 2008

In May 2008 my team at Yahoo Brickhouse and I launched a beta of a project called Fire Eagle. This was a very very early location sharing project — one of the first in fact. We spent a lot of time thinking about the privacy implications of sharing your location and giving it to services online and all the things you might be able to do with it. In the end we didn’t get to develop it as far as we’d have liked for a whole variety of reasons, and location technologies moved on and far surpassed our early vision—pretty much exactly as you’d hope they would.

Remember, at this time the first iPhone had only just come out about a year before and didn’t have a GPS unit in it. The App Store would launch a few months after we put Fire Eagle into the world. At this point if you wanted to install apps on your phone you could just about do so on a Nokia device because they ran Python. They also had GPS capabilities (sort of). They were the planetary cutting edge of mobile computing.

So yeah, we’d started working on location-sharing technology for mobile devices before capital-A Apps even existed. On Nokia feature phones. In retrospect maybe we should have waited a little bit.

Anyway, at the time I got asked by journalists what we could do with location information in our everyday lives and for one particularly nice guy I wrote up a quick repository of thoughts.

Stumbling on this e-mail today, I find myself as surprised about the things that happened exactly as I expected, as by the things that never happened at all.

Oddly I didn’t mention easy mapping and navigation. Perhaps I thought that was too obvious, or maybe it just didn’t occur to me. But I did go into quite a lot of detail about some of the things I thought might be fun, and looking back at them today I find myself happily surprised by some of my foresight, a bit embarrassed by some omissions and errors and oddly annoyed that some of the fun ideas I wrote about still haven’t come to pass.

Anyway, I thought you guys might find it interesting to read some unedited prognostications about what we might do when location technology was in everyone’s pocket from a time just before that actually happened. You might find it funny, or ridiculous, or prescient or obvious. Either way, here it is.

What I thought we’d do with location-based technology before everyone had location technology as recounted to a lovely journalist in late 2008:

As with most other technologies, location technologies come into their own when they’re ubiquitous — when there’s little or no effort to using them and they can be simply integrated everywhere. Honestly, if we can get to that level of ubiquity then I think there’s no end of possibilities.

The mobile phone completely changed the way that people socialised. Location services have the potential to shake that up again — people moving from carefully co-ordinating their social schedules, to calling each other on the move, through to taking real-time opportunities to hang out with their friends as and when they happen to be passing.

Then think about geocoding every single piece of content or communication or photo uploaded by anyone anywhere. That gives you enormous possibilities for exploring that material in new ways. I’ve talked about this before. Can you imagine tuning into the conversations going on about Barack Obama on Twitter in real-time but then being able to see what people in cities are saying versus people in the countryside, or in India versus the US, or in one neighbourhood to the next.

The ability to tailor web searches to where you are, to nuance what people receive based on what people in their area are interested in, to keep people up to date about things going on in their area and to better understand and get a handle on the amazing stuff that surrounds them — there’s a fair amount of scope there too.

And it can go all the way down into the most pervasive of our communications — geocoded e-mails and IMs that give me records of what I’ve been doing that can be plotted on maps, or where i can do a search not just for stuff containing words, but e-mails I received when I was in San Jose or IMs I sent when I was in London.

The life-logging things are interesting and useful too. Flickr acts as an extraordinary life-logging memory aid for people, helping them tell the story of their lives. Adding the element of location into that could be profound. And there’s the relationship between the information of individuals and what they’re prepared to share with the rest of the world.

The decision to incorporate location into Firefox and into Windows 7 opens up a whole range of possibilities too — there are lots of opportunities to use location at the level of device rather than user which this opens up, even if it is pretty basic stuff at the moment.

Generally though, I think location is just one of the first pieces of personal information that the next few years will see us try to capture, instrument and find uses for. Giving people control over location information and giving them the tools to help them share and use it all over the web is a bigger deal than just helping open up location itself and it’s one of the areas we’re deeply interested in.

I’m not sure that’s going to help you very much, but there you go. That’s what’s on my mind…