Socialight and Locative Media
Social locative media is rising in popularity, and it shows. I came across a project called Socialight (Daniel Melinger and Michael Sharon, graduates of New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program) a couple of weeks ago, and was skeptical as I knew that there are technical difficulties in location tracking on mobile phones; stopping social locative media from reaching the critical mass. Socialight is one of the projects from Kamida.
Socialight, like Plazes, does what it can within the technical limitations of Java ME phones; searching for and manually placing notes in locations or by using an SMS-based interface.
The partners, in a paper entitled “Socialight: A Mobile Social Networking System [pdf]” mentioned that Socialight can glean location data using a number of different methods - Bluetooth, GPS and network operator data. However, this functionality has yet to filter itself into usable form.
So far, nothing new. Plazes.com did all of this at the end of 2005, and Google Earth Communities enabled people to label positions in the world in August 2005. What kind of emergent sociality will arise from situated information spaces? How can we harness all this data in a more useful way?
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