Socialight / blog+news

A front page piece in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly insert traces the rise of the geoweb from its first clear description in Neal Stephenson’s brilliant fictional work (and my personal fave sci-fi novel of all-time), Snow Crash all the way to Socialight. The article ends with a look toward the future; the real-world browsing we’re enabling with Socialight is identified as what will be common in the near future.

Here’s a quote from the article’s final paragraph:

…the incorporation of satellite-positioning technology into mobile phones and cars could open the floodgates. When it is available, simply moving about one’s neighbourhood can then be tantamount to browsing and generating content without doing anything, as demonstrated by a company called Socialight. Its service lets mobile users attach notes to any location, to be read by others who come along later. Taken further, the result could end up being a sort of extrasensory information awareness, annotation and analysis capability in the real world. “When that happens”, says [Google Earth chief technologist] Mr Jones, “then the map is actually a little portal on to life itself.” The only thing that can hold it back, he believes, is the rate at which society can adapt.

Article in print here.