Locative Messaging and MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab
by Imran Ali
Like ITP, MIT’s Mobile Experience Lab is doing some interesting and research into mobility.
The Electronic Lens, or eLens, project is particularly intriguing, taking ‘civic ubiquitous networking’ as a starting point to explore the use of geo-tagged mobile messages to tag locations, places and buildings - essentially annotating the physical environment.
Conceptually, eLens isn’t so novel, but the ubiquitous computing environment necessary to enable such experiences is only just beginning to emerge. Unfortunately, the real barriers are more corporate than technological…
- In hoarding geo-data and restricting access to locative APIs, mobile operators have lost control over the value of their locative data to the likes of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s superior open mapping APIs.
- Twittervision’s location commands provides a mechanism for geo-tagging text messages, dis-intermediating the mobile operator’s locative platform entirely.
- Nokia’s integration of GPS in the N95 and other upcoming handsets bypasses cellcos altogether; though it’d be cuter if the N95 could automagically geotag photos and outgoing messages…
Three years ago, Nokia’s Chris Heathcote spoke about 35 Ways to Find Your Location, utilising everything from low-end hacks to high-end solutions. Since that time, while mobile operator’s concentrated on a short-sighted strategy of locking away valuable and useful data, handset builders and the internet industry have done and end run around operators using open philosophies and technologies.
Lesson: Be Open.
( Maybe I shouldn’t mention the success of open spectrum wifi - vs auctioned spectrum 3G 
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