Socialight / blog+news

Clive Thompson wrote about the “Future of the Web” for WIRED.com and includes a choice quote from yours truly.

The crux of the piece is this:

The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests: Model-train collectors and free-speech activists and Britney Spears fans could swarm onto the discussion boards and blogs, from Chicago to Tehran. By severing the link between location and geography, the internet turned everything upside down.

Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction — because your location becomes most important thing about you.

Then there’s my zinger.

“It’s like this form of Terminator vision,” jokes Socialight founder Dan Melinger, whose app is set to launch soon on the iPhone. He thinks that as more and more people tag the real world, it will create a sort of parallel, invisible internet of data floating over our everyday lives.

“You can figure out the mood of a place by searching for all notes in an area,” Melinger adds. What types of music do people listen to in this neighborhood? What do they argue about?

I’m still patiently waiting for my retinal implants.

Read the whole post here.

Today we announced the launch of the Socialight API. This gives developers the ability to build applications that leverage our system for location-based content all around the world. The Socialight API exposes many of the features of the platform using well-known standards like XML, GeoRSS and KML. These tools now make it much easier to tag and share content about places near you. For instance, imagine an iPhone app that highlights the coffee shops in your neighborhood with cute baristas. Or think of a GPS device in your rental car that shows you the best bars in Boston – and overnight parking garages nearby.

In addition to providing various API hooks that your application can use, we’ve also released some useful reference code in the form of samples. You can see some of this sample code in our API tutorial and as a Ruby command-line application. Most interesting of all, however, is the open-source release of our official Java mobile application. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for nearly a year now and after working a couple of months on the code, it’s finally ready for a release into the wild as an alpha.

With location-aware systems like Google’s Android, Apple iPhone, Dash, BugLabs and others in the market, it’s proving to be an exciting year for both mobile and local content. I look forward to seeing what you create. We can keep the discussion open using the developer group and, of course, please get in touch with comments directly.

Happy holidays, Socialight fans!

As I was thinking about another year gone by without the advent of mass-market flying cars, along came this quote about Socialight in a piece from The Press, New Zealand (22 December 2007):

…get ready for computing’s fourth wave. We have had the mainframe, personal computer and internet eras. The next big thing is going to be mobile computing coupled to the ‘‘geoweb’’.

It has been a science-fiction dream for a long time. To have a phone that not only— and affordably— browses the internet, but which is plugged into a geographically aware version of the net. Simms [Tomizone] says that, as you walk around, the phone will know where you are and bring alive your environment accordingly. Overseas, new kinds of social networking sites like Socialight are gaining traction. You can attach cyber notes to locations so anyone walking past will be alerted to events or have a run down of the inhabitants and history of the place.

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.

An insightful story featuring Socialight was just published on the front page of LiveWire, the tech section for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Melbourne. We’re psyched to get some love from our friends down under, home of the gap year and my personal favorite publisher of local guidebooks, Lonely Planet.

Here are links to page 1 and page 2 of the article from the print version.

Want to feel like a local wherever you go on your summer travels? Of course you do! Use Socialight to find the best things near you. Then, let people know what you think is best. We’re happy to see that Motorola’s recommending you use Socialight to do just that.

From MotorolaRoadTrips.com:

Sign up for Online Sharing & Social Sites

• Flickr for photo sharing
• YouTube for video sharing
• Twitter for micro-blogging
• Socialight for geo-tagging
• Google Maps for interactive maps, directions and traffic

We just launched our new Facebook application! It lets you create Sticky Notes using photos in your Facebook albums. Now, you can explain the story behind the picture and where it was taken. The app also shows off your latest creation on your Facebook profile. Check it out over at Facebook. We were also mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article today about the launch of many new applications on the Facebook Platform.

Piers Fawkes came by our Greenwich Village office a couple of weeks ago to interview me for his trends site, PSFK. Video from the interview was just posted.

We’re in The Wall Street Journal again. Staff reporter, Amol Sharma wrote about us in a front page story in a special section.

Another creative application, says Richard Wong of venture firm Accel Partners, will be letting consumers blog about particular locations as they travel. Then those blog entries would be automatically tagged with their geographical coordinates. So if you were to post photos or blogs from, say, a scenic rest stop on a long drive, others could find the same spot later. Companies like New York-based Kamida that offer such “geotagging” services now require people to enter their location manually but are integrating GPS to remove that step.

Full article (registration required)

Fast Company notices that “Social mapping technology grows up a bit” and that Socialight is part of the next stage in its evolution.