Geotagging Is Overblown, No?
I’m not really sure why you want to read my words or why on earth you’d care to follow me on Twitter. But you do; so thank you! There’s something I’m sure most people don’t care about, and that’s where I am. Whether I’m physically located in front of my computer, on a plane to Burkina Faso, or eating mom’s killer meatloaf, 99.9% of the time, it doesn’t matter.
Proponents of geotagging will tell you how it’s neat because you can find out when a buddy is nearby and meet up for drinks. I might not be a social butterfly, but if someone I actually want to meet is in the area, I’ll know about it.
The functionality is not totally pointless. I see where it could be kinda cool to plot an image on a map a la Google Maps, but the phenomenon might be overblown.
Not to get all Big Brother is watching on you, but as G-tagging becomes more transparent (built into all new camera models, cell phones, and so on) it will become important for people to understand what is being tracked and where the data is reported.
Yahoo’s new geo-location platform Fire Eagle, that gives developers the ability to include positional data in their applications sans headache, is now open to the public. That means users will be able to syndicate their positional data to hundreds – if not thousands of partner services in the near future.
If I’m wrong down the road, I’ll admit it. Now it’s your turn. Tell us why you’re so hot on geotagging.
P.S. This blog post was written from 40° 46′ N, 73° 54′ W.
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