04/05/2005

A congervence of a number of recent interests has led me to become increasingly keen the idea of a combination of spatial annotation and folksonomic social networks. I really think there are going to be huge developments in this area in the next year, and especially once GPS-enabled cameraphones become available.

There’s already a debate developing in relation to how “geo-annotation/geotagging” will manifest itself, and how users will respond to it. The Institute For The Future predicts that it will be a social act, done for the benfit of others:

Every one of these personal geo-annotations boils down to “I was here” or “You are here”. People will take the time to compose a message and tag that message to a place because they want you to know that they were there, or because they have information that will be relevant to you later when you’re in the same location, or some combination of both.

Peter Merholz disagrees:

Why would you want to annotate space for yourself? For whatever reasons you would use del.icio.us. While del.icio.us thrives as a “social bookmark” site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity — by and large, I’m saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It’s an added benefit, but not the raison d’etre.

I would say that individuals’ motivation for using a given system could be either of the above. However, the success of previous examples (Flickr, del.icio.us, Audioscrobbler) has been based on both the mining of community data, and the system’s ability to capture individual’s data unobtrusively — satisfying both types of users.

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