We all know how tagging makes the Web a richer place (by tapping into people’s desire to categorize things and share those categories, ad-hoc though they may be, with the everyone else). Tagging brings a bottoms-up order to the Web by making information more searchable and thus easier to find. Now it is time to start tagging the world. The real world.
In fact, millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, add a review to Yelp, Tweet about a specific place, or use any of the dozens of geo-aware social apps springing up all over the place. They are not just tagging the world with keywords, they are commenting on it and annotating it in tiny little bursts. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision or Flickrvision, which show Tweets and Flickr photos, respectively, on a map as they are posted to the Web.
Services such as Plazes (now owned by Nokia), Brightkite, and Nokia’s new Friend View app all combine social communications and location information, making them visible on a map.
Most mobile social networks, on GPS phones at least, put geo-labels on everything you do. FriendFeed just recently started adding Google maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer.
Geo-coded communications are becoming more and more common, and this is just the start. I like to complain about the increased noise level that lifestreaming services are bringing into our lives. While that continues to be a growing problem on an individual basis for people who want to tune in and use these services (”You’re at the bus stop? Great. Keep those Tweets coming.”), on an aggregate level all the seemingly useless drivel has the potential to become useful meta-data.
And this is not limited to GPS-enabled services. You can tag Tweets, for instance, with hashmark codes that act as tags for places and things (”#bus-stop”, “#centralpark”). All of these messages get dumped into databases on the Web, which are then searchable. And that is where things get interesting. Chris Brogan explains in a post titled “Secrets of the Annotated World”:
Services like Twitter and FriendFeed and Flickr and Facebook and LinkedIn and more are hosting conversations around you that might be of value to you. . . . If you’re not using services like Yelp and BrightKite, (and you could name several others), you’re missing some of the glyphs and warnings we’re leaving on the landscape to tell you about the way things are versus the way things are marketed. You’re missing chance encounters. You’re missing stray opportunities.
Again, you don’t have to get involved. It’s just that we are, and we’re passing many more notes than you can imagine.
I am glad there are people out there like Chris who are obsessive about geo-coding everything they do. They are like the early taggers, the two percent or so of people on Flickr, Delicious, and other services who did all the heavy lifting of organizing and categorizing all the data that was dumped into them. The more that data can be sliced and diced, the more useful it becomes. And location data is particularly valuable because it relates to places, people, and events in the real world.
Every geo-coded Tweet, Flickr photo, or restaurant review is adding a tag or comment to the world that is then searchable by others. It is what will make visions like Tonchidot’s Sekai Camera a reality. It is why Fotonauts, an upcoming photo app that launched at TC50, makes it easy to geo-tag every photo in an album via Google Maps or Wikipedia. Everything in the world will be tagged. But it is such a huge task that the only way to do it is if we all pitch in. (Or at least if Chris and his friends pitch in—the rest of us can freeload).
y not just have an app that geocodes G1 pics when you take them with your Gphone and syncs it with Picasa as public pics?
Flickr doesn’t work with the G1. As you know all the upload buttons are grayed out when you navigate to flickr on the Android browser and no security setting can re-enable them.
I would like to see a photo sharing service that integrates more closely with the capabilities of the iphone and android, and does these things automatically.
The tagging info could be auto filled from a database of keywords about the long & lat of your location and you could simply edit them before hitting “share” after taking the pics. The pics could also be auto submitted to the service via 3G after taking them with no extra pressing on the “share” button.
such as the new service would be like Flickr on the server side, but on the Android App side, it would auto fill the tagging info based on keywords associated with your geo location, and automatically upload them right after you click on the button to snap the pic, so you can keep taking pictures without worrying about deciding which ones to share.
Or you could disable that and manually hit the “share it” option.
The reason this doesn’t happen is because it’s too hard. Make it easy. We have the technology, we just aren’t implementing it.
And let’s lose flickr. We need a new service.
gphone is new..flickr should work in time…
Location based Services is the next Holly Grail in the mobile world. Soon your phone will take you places you have never been and you will ping location coordinates to your friends to meet them there. No Wonder Nokia already owns sites in that area. We certainly can’t blame them for being visionary. Interesting times ahead.
Great post anyway. Totally on the money.
JPh @ BRANDMANIA – http://concept2...on.blogspot.com
“Soon your phone will …”
Try “Right now”. The iPhone was prohibitive because of the $75 a month base plan for unlimited data + base voice, but the T-mobile phone is $25 for unlimited data + $29 for base voice & 400 SMS.
That’s the difference. All those people that couldn’t afford the 2 year plan with AT&T are going to be free now to get HTC quality services with Android. Plus Apple asks people to buy a Mac in order to use the SDK and create apps. Android’s SDK works on all 3 platforms with Eclipse.
Apple put developers into a little box with the Apple IIa-e years ago and windows sdk jail broke people into a new age. Same is gonna happen with Android. It’s all about making it affordable for people.
I walked out of the T-mobile store with a G1 for $179 + tax and $54.99 in monthly fees. That’s just at the limit for what most people are ready to pay for this new tech, if not slightly above the limit.
That’s what’s keeping this from happening on a grand scale right now.
it would be nice to have an rss feed for every geocoordinate in the world – with some kind of fuzziness. is there an aggregator which collects all the geocoded data floating around? after that is accomplished we can talk about filtering the harvested data
That would be cool… like say you wanted to get the twits from say Yankee stadium you would just enter that geocoordinate? Is that what you mean?
yes. ‘yankee stadium’ could then be an aggregator of all the relevant geocoordinates. so you could either search for ‘yankee stadium’ and get its feed or for a specific coordinate and receive all aggregators which use this coordinte. so i am thinking of some kind of service which lets someone, who wants to create a location based rss feed select te approppriaty coordinates. as a consumer/provider u get a list of all available feeds which use this coordinate. and as i mentioned, i would like to have ‘fuzziness’ so u could select the physical range of your query. from accurate to neighbourhood to city to country…
Millions of RSS items are already geo tagged using GeoRSS, which is supported by google. Yanoo! Micorsoft and all of the professional mapping apps. See Georss.org for details.
yes. ‘yankee stadium’ could then be an aggregator of all the relevant geocoordinates. so you could either search for ‘yankee stadium’ and get its feed or for a specific coordinate and receive all aggregators which use this coordinte. so i am thinking of some kind of service which lets someone, who wants to create a location based rss feed select te approppriaty coordinates. as a consumer/provider u get a list of all available feeds which use this coordinate
public domain research should not be limited
It is quite amazing how things have changed in a few short years. In college, none of these sites existed and now there are worldwide!
If you have a blackberry, checkout Mosnaps http://www.mosnaps.com that geo-codes all photos and does a mashup with google maps. You can post photos to your wordpress blog, picasa , facebook and flickr or share it on mosnaps.com/your_page
The app uses triangulation to get location. You can also notify friends everytime you upload a photo.
Shonie, don’t take encouragement from these bandwagon jumpers. This story might have produced an A grade in high school, but out here in the “real world” it earns the tags pointless, no substance, boring, no technical vision, regurgitating others views, 100th rehash of the same old TC BS.
Chris, then what do you say to the 6.9 million iPhones sold? I think that the statement that $179 down and $55 monthly being the upper limit for this new tech is wrong. While lower priced “smart phone” options like the Android are integral in getting this tagging thing to spread, I don’t think that $179 is the limit of what people will pay.
I think it is incredibly smart for Nokia to make that purchase. Another thing that is going to get this ball rolling, and spread the “heavy lifting” of geotagging around as Erick puts it, is by having the phone companies themselves make the tagging functionality part of the phone when it ships. That is, while things like BrightKite (which I use and love) are great, there would be a much higher adoption rate if something like that shipped with every handset Nokia or Apple or RIM shipped.
“get this ball rolling, and spread the “heavy lifting” of geotagging around as Erick puts it, is by having the phone companies themselves make the tagging functionality part of the phone when it ships.”
There is no need. Android lets you create these applications and sell or give them away regardless of “Apple’s approval” to a store.
This can easily be achieved by a good 3rd party android app.
Great post. As you mention, location based tagging will be huge. One idea would be to have pictures taken at a party easily accessible to all those who attended.
Great article.
Imran
http://www.flic...mrananwar/sets/
People want to use tags, but they don’t want to create them. Given all the photos on the web, I guess it’s even too big a task for Chris and his buddy’s.
So ultimately it will only work, if the tagging is done automatically.
For geo tags (and newly taken pics), GPS phones can do that. For name tags, MyHeritage has a semiautomatic feature that helps you to tag people throughout your whole photo collection (which you can import directly from flickr, facebook, etc.) in minutes. It works with face recognition technology and people you have identified once can be tagged automatically in the future.
This is automated name tagging, it reliefs us from that “huge task” of manual tagging (for the name part at least) and you can even use the name tags back on flickr via an export feature. Give it a try.
I’d be willing to bet iPhone prices will drop in time for Christmas (if the rumors are true) and suddenly tagging the whole world will become accessible to MANY more people at a reasonable cost.
Admittedly, I am the worst at tagging anything. Personal pictures are all left untagged in one large untitled folder. Thank god there are some people out there who would rather tag and categorize files than see sunlight or consume food on any given day.
I’m just worried about the day when categorization meets EEG machines and websites are tagging my thoughts into various terrifying bins.
I have just launched a website called http://www.tagthis.com that gives you suggestions based on what you like and allows you to organize the internet the way you want it to be. It is in early beta would gladly appreciate any feedback!
Thanks