Home is where 127.0.0.1 is

Written byFaruk Ateş. 6 comments

Faruk Ateş

Faruk Ateş is a creative design & web development consultant living in San Francisco. He writes and speaks about making great websites, advocates Web Standards & Web Accessibility and is the original creator of Modernizr, a toolkit that helps you use exciting CSS3 and HTML5 features to enrich your website.

If your computer is your home, geolocation is set to remind you that there's a whole world out there.

Three years ago, if you told some­one you had a GPS — or Global Posi­tion­ing Sys­tem — device in your pocket or back­pack, the most com­mon expec­ta­tion would have been that you took your car’s GPS mod­ule with you, to pre­vent it from being stolen. Hand­held devices with GPS receivers were very rare back then, exclud­ing the car mod­ules, which had been around for a num­ber of years and were grow­ing increas­ingly pop­u­lar. But nowa­days, with the mil­lions of iPhones, the Palm Pres, the var­i­ous Android phones and even some dig­i­tal cam­eras that have GPS built-​​in, your abil­ity to pin­point your exact loca­tion on the planet has sud­denly become com­mon­place, mun­dane even. Want to know where you are? Hit up the GPS and you’ll have your lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude data in sec­onds right there on your small screen.

I’m here. Where are you?

This rapid pro­lif­er­a­tion of position-​​aware devices, find­ing their way into the pock­ets and purses of peo­ple every­where, has not gone unno­ticed by the web and the con­sumer elec­tron­ics mar­ket. Lead­ing the pack, the Apple iPhone App­Store car­ries a raft of appli­ca­tions that explore the poten­tial that comes with know­ing your place in the world. For exam­ple Geo­caching, an app that allows you to play a global trea­sure hunt­ing game using the real world as a play­ing field and high-​​tech GPS gad­getry as instru­ments to find vir­tual trea­sures. Or try Urbans­poon, an appli­ca­tion that uses your cur­rent loca­tion to offer you a restau­rant or café in your vicinity.

On the web, free ser­vices like Brightkite, Loopt and Foursquare allow you to ‘check in’ to a loca­tion and share it with all your friends. ‘I’m at Thor­ough Bread and Pas­try in San Fran­cisco, writ­ing an arti­cle for a mag­a­zine’ — some­thing I just shared with the world on my Brightkite and my Twitter.

A great many peo­ple use their GPS enabled devices to check in at bars and restau­rants, clubs and cof­fee shops, work and home. Oth­ers use the enhanced aware­ness of the device to see who or what else might be in their vicin­ity, some­thing par­tic­u­larly use­ful when explor­ing new cities or coun­tries. When in Rome, go where the Romans go. Get away from the beaten path and the throngs of tourists, and use the power of the inter­net in your pocket to see what else is avail­able — things that are prob­a­bly not listed in the Lonely Planet guide.

In just a few years, this location-​​awareness has trans­formed the lives of mil­lions of peo­ple. Some more exam­ples: just the other night, my friend was using MobileMe’s ‘Find My iPhone’ fea­ture to check where his wife and son were on their 15 hour drive home. The car’s GPS had stopped work­ing and while rely­ing on Google Maps on the phone, they missed their exit due to heavy rain. Google was then try­ing to take them on a course that would have added a one-​​hour detour to the already long drive, but thanks to ‘Find My iPhone’ my friend was a able to pin­point where they were and pro­vide them with pre­cise direc­tions to get back on track.

Using that same ser­vice, a Live­Jour­nal user named Kevin who goes by the alias “hap­py­waf­fle”, was able to track down some­one who had thought them­selves lucky enough to “find” an iPhone in a bar one night. Chas­ing the cul­prit with the aid of a friend and a lap­top and using MobileMe’s ser­vice to fol­low the device, Kevin was lucky enough to in fact ‘Find his iPhone’.

These exam­ples illus­trate how use­ful and valu­able loca­tion aware­ness can be, but they are still rel­a­tively sim­ple use cases on their own. They are enough to mat­ter, but really only indica­tive of so much potential.

Tear­ing Down the Wall

On the web itself we haven’t seen too much move­ment in terms of sup­port­ing loca­tion aware­ness. There are some good rea­sons for that. For one, lap­tops don’t typ­i­cally come with GPS receivers built-​​in. As well, web browsers cur­rently need a plu­gin to work with Sky­hook Wire­less, an online ser­vice that keeps a data­base of the real-​​world loca­tions of wire­less hotspots found in almost every urban area. With an appro­pri­ate plu­gin, the user can grant web­sites and ser­vices access to the (rough approx­i­ma­tion of the) computer’s posi­tion in the world. It’s not as good as GPS of course, but it comes pretty close.

But move­ments are afoot. At the time of writ­ing the lat­est pub­lic release of Fire­fox, 3.5, comes with built-​​in sup­port for the new Geolo­ca­tion API spec­i­fi­ca­tion from the W3C. This spec­i­fi­ca­tion, cur­rently still in Work­ing Draft but soon to go into Last Call sta­tus, allows devel­op­ers to use a native imple­men­ta­tion in the browser — as opposed to a plu­gin that the user must first man­u­ally install — to access Geolo­ca­tion data through a com­bi­na­tion of services.

While Fire­fox is the only desk­top browser at this time that sup­ports the new stan­dard, mobile­Sa­fari, the ver­sion that ships with the iPhone, does so as well. And while desk­top Safari doesn’t, the just-​​released Snow Leop­ard OS con­tains built-​​in func­tion­al­ity to deter­mine the loca­tion of the device, so there’s some rea­son to expect that it will even­tu­ally sup­port Geolo­ca­tion, too. With two of the four main browsers sup­port­ing it on the desk­top, devel­op­ers will be more wil­ing, not to men­tion more able, to explore the tech­nol­ogy.

And then what happens?

Let’s look at a cou­ple of ways in which web­sites could make use of the Geolo­ca­tion standard.

One of the first things that springs to mind has to be geo-​​tagging of con­tent. It’s already a fairly com­mon prac­tice to geo-​​tag pho­tos, so why not other types of con­tent? While it may often be less rel­e­vant to know where a blog post is writ­ten, com­pared to a photo where the loca­tion also helps iden­tify the con­tents of the photo itself, it’s still meta-​​data that can be of inter­est, even significance.

Location-​​oriented web ser­vices could do all sorts of things a lot eas­ier, faster and auto­mat­i­cally with this tech­nol­ogy. Ser­vices like Brightkite and Foursquare could almost power them­selves with it. A website’s design could be made to include pho­tos from a photo-​​sharing site like Flickr that are geo-​​tagged to be at or near the visitor’s loca­tion. Or per­haps you’d want your own blog to include one such photo with each blog post you make while traveling.

Web­sites like Ebay and Craigslist could tell you about every­thing that’s up for sale within a ten-​​block radius from where you are, and Yelp could wel­come new vis­i­tors with the lat­est and great­est shops and restau­rants nearby. The oppor­tu­ni­ties for brand exten­sion, design and mar­ket­ing, as well as com­mu­ni­ca­tion with your vis­i­tors are open ended. When these tech­nolo­gies become widely avail­able, the truly inno­v­a­tive imple­men­ta­tions will start to emerge.

We’re liv­ing in a world where ‘home’ is becom­ing more and more the place where we open up our lap­tops. The new home is the screen through which we com­mu­ni­cate with the rest of the world; it’s about time we let the real world remind us where we are, and to take in our surroundings.

There’s a whole new world to explore—again.

Further Reading

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