Technologies about to collide

So, by now everyone has seen Google Maps and by and large find it very impressive. You might even have seen the housing finder that someone built by integrating google maps and craigslist, or that someone developed a mechanism for integrating Flickr with google maps and called it Geobloggers. Cooler still is the fact that Amazon is working on a yellow pages such that you can see pictures of the businesses, and in fact walk down streets and see what’s nearby.

This is all pretty cool stuff. What I’d really like to see is someone integrate this mapping/photographic stuff in such a way that it also reflects time. For example – lets fast forward a few years when we all have cameras in our phones, and those cameras are actually decent (multi-megapixel) quality. When we take a picture, not only is the time captured with it (very common these days) but also the GPS co-ordinates (less common these days). You now have an image that looks good, and it is tagged with where on earth it was taken and when. Now you zap this phone off to an online service… like a Mobog of the future.

What might we end up with? How cool would it be to be able to browse your city or town and see what was going on at a given instant in time? How about big events like concerts? See the band from multiple angles. See yourself in others’ pictures. Maybe even big world events… like 9/11. We could have thousands of pictures of something like that from numerous angles at various instances in time. Then zoom out and slide over and see what was happening in Los Angeles at that same point in time.

I think something like that would be pretty damn cool. I also don’t think we’re that far away from seeing it.

4 thoughts on “Technologies about to collide

  1. Hi just a quick one,

    I agree that time is an important issue. For each photo I pull down the Exif header information from Flickr, their API puts this into an easy to consume format.

    A few of these include GPS location and *most* of the include the time taken.

    As well as the title, description location I’m also keeping the date/time taken as I know it’s going to be important one day.

    In the future it’ll be possible to search location and time. If you think about it as a sphere, you’re saying I want things that are within 2km north/south and east/west of this point, and 2 months distance into the future and past of time X.

    You’ll be able to expand your search range in any of the directions. i.e. I want to find stuff closer to this point, but extend the time range. Or I want to find stuff within 100km and within the last 5 mins.

    In short, I’m recording it now, when there’s enough data it’ll start getting used 🙂

    Cheers
    Dan

  2. T, for a total loser like yourself this must be your lucky day! It would be like a normal person going on to their own blog and finding out Paris Hilton reads it and leaves comments.

  3. Hilarious. But I, too, agree that it is an important issue that needs more attention.

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