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A few hours after we posted our location as context post last week, Twitter announced the same. With very different approaches.

I encourage you to go check out the Mashable discussion; many commenters are worried about opting out. Ignoring the problem of carelessly reading the announcement (maybe they just read the title?), there is a lot of concern about automatic tracking of location.

Few people, I believe, will want to live-stream to the world their location. Yes, of course many people will. But the over-30 woman typical of Twitter and Facebook? Probably not. Will she want to use location for their updates? Probably.

Location accuracy, precision, and comprehension

A quick primer: precision is the number of decimal places you measure something to; accuracy is how correct it is. The less accurate you think your measurement is, the less precise you should report it.

Read the blog post where this image comes from, and Steven complains about precision and accuracy at more length.

If you are a Verizon Blackberry user in a particular part of the Kansas City metro, your location is reported as what we believe is the actual tower location. A single tower in a warehouse area, not a triangulation of visible towers. Nevertheless, location in Google Latitude is reported as a single point. Very precise. Great for weather and maybe traffic; terrible for directions and geocaching. Location information is valuable at different accuracies, as long as we don't pretend it's precise.

Regardless of accuracy or precision, the usability of latitude/longitude information is terrible. It's useless to most people without a decoder, such as Google Maps. Nobody knows what 38.949984,-95.236038 is; many won't be able to tell you what hemisphere it is in. Actually, even Google doesn't know what it is, and provides only an address range. (Answer: approximately where my office desk is.)

So better than lat/long is an address (1901 Massachusetts St.) or a place name (Little Springs Design headquarters.) The preferred one depends on context. Sometimes absolute position is irrelevant, and only relative position is relevant (8 blocks south of downtown, or 3 blocks east of me.)

And many times absolute location is irrelevant, and only type or name of the location is relevant. And this is quite interesting for those commenters above. I don't mind telling the world I'm in a coffee shop, or in Starbucks, or a grocery store. Immediate family will know what city I'm in, and likely what physical place I'm in. Coworkers will know city and type of establishment. Family and friends far away will know type of establishment and maybe city. Strangers will know type of establishment only. We leverage the knowledge inside our network to provide privacy.

Some uses of location

These are largely social focused use.

Location as context

Location provides useful context to many status updates. Not geolocation; latitude and longitude require the reader to take several steps to understand the information being transmitted, and few will bother. Our discussion last week was for location as context; take a look at the Design For Mobile wiki page for explicit logic.

Many times location such as "Kansas City" provides absolutely no context. An update such as "Bad coffee day" is unexplained with a city as a context; it's very relevant with Starbucks or the office as a context. Which Starbucks? Which office? Nobody cares.

Latitude/longitude does not work for context. Too many steps for just better understanding context. Maybe some day there will be a single, easy-to-use solution, but I don't see anything likely on the horizon.

Automatic location does not work well for context. Which location? Henry's? Coffee Shop? Downtown? Lawrence? Kansas? One of those will likely be the appropriate context; the others won't make sense. And how does the machine decide? There's some theory, but I don't see it being easy and automatic.

Location for discovery

Based on the state of the blogosphere, many people believe that status updates to aid discovery will be big. They envision an augmented reality (or just a map) feed to see what is going on in a particular place. This could be useful, "It's dead in here. I'm heading out." could help somebody decide whether to enter an establishment.

I'm not sure this will be huge. Sure, it will be nice... in certain limited environments. Who is saying that it's dead? If it's my friend, I care. If it's a stranger, someone needs to build a whole other level of scarily-intrusive collaborative filtering to determine if you care. By myself, I've no idea whether it's relevant. And my friend is unlikely to be in that establishment. (I'd sure like to know if they are!)

Location as status

Work, home, kids' soccer, undefined. What if that was the entire list of locations? If the tool of your choice detected if you were in one of these, and set your status accordingly?

In this scenario, "undefined" is very interesting. This lack of data provides information, but only to people close to me. Office workers know I'm not at the office. My partner knows, based on the time of day and other information, that I am on my way home.

The inspiration for this was actually an automatic location system proposed at the Design For Mobile 2008 conference by Jared Benson of Punchcut. In particular, he noted that the human aspects of location comprehension.

Foursquare is attempting something like this, though its users are sometimes providing just city information and sometimes street address. But as best I can tell, the user must manually check in and out of locations. Somebody please advise how it actually works (the web site doesn't say.) Brightkite seems to work in much the same way, and I probably missed some more.

Location for...

Most of this post has focused on Facebook, Twitter, and social uses of location. However, there is a lot more available. Here are 47 location services ideas.

The Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted this week by Carnival founder and relentless connective education advocate Judy Breck at her long-standing blog Golden Swamp. The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

Of course we’re promoting it because we got in this week. Actually, twice. My entry on sustainability of the mobile industry and Christopher Nemeth’s first appearance in the Carnival, ^location – adding in context to your content, as Judy says “giving us location carets and lat-long irrelevance … hours before Twitter announces lat-long API.” That last generated quite a bit of discussion, so if you have a thought, join on in.

Mobile continues to march along, evolve and grow. Since I posted this design template last year I have built quite a few other design elements.

But mostly spread out among a variety of other documents, or for specific projects. So, last week I got them all together and after input from the rest of the team here, I have an all new document for everyone:

These files are updated irregularly, and instead of always warranting a blog post, will always be placed on the Drawing Tools & Templates page in the D4M Wiki, along with lots of links to other's templates, and tips for using whatever design tool strikes our fancy. Big changes will probably be posted to the Twitter account, so subscribe to that if you'd like.

• Original document, still in Macromedia Freehand MX 2008 (.fh11) zipped up, 1.1 mb
• PDF for viewing, or opening in Adobe Illustrator, et. al., 744 kb
• Most of these items, as Adobe In-Design CS3 libraries, 5.4mb zipped up.

There are little elements of all sorts thrown all over the now four page document, but a couple of the more interesting ones are:

All the vector phones that we use internally. The best, shiniest iPhone I drew myself, as I was unexcited about any others I'd seen.

As a follow up to the gesture research we've done here, I have started making iconic, inter-frame gesture graphics to match that language. These will clearly be expanded as we execute more work.

The more I work with the team here the more I become convinced that documentation styles are key to communicating well, and that they have to meet the design process you use. So, if you download this document either make sure that the elements you borrow meet your needs, or read this blog and my design process book and just borrow our process as well.

One more point about mobile design process: It's mobile. While the process book I just mentioned is pretty generalized, the templates, and increasingly some of our documentation styles (stay tuned for an all new diagram style in the next few months) are getting fairly mobile specific. If you are reading this, I'll assume you are a mobile designer. I want to remind everyone to notice that most cool, new design tools seem to be about desktop web these days; make sure that whatever diagramming style and design artifacts you use are appropriate and serve your process well.

Even in the seemingly remote burg of Lawrence, KS, I am all over the place.

I could be at home, at the office, the coffeeshop, en route to Kansas City, at a show, restaurant, art gallery, or bar. I could be at the park with the kids, I could be at my folks’ house in Leavenworth. I could be at the antique store, the scooter shop, or getting my guitar repaired. Maybe I’m getting my haircut, or an oil change for my car.

So, what if I tweeted or sent a status update to any of my social networks stating something like the following:

“I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.”

Great (even brilliant) content, posted all over the ethers. But….so what? It’s a bon mot that doesn’t amount to much, and is an opinion shouted to a crowded room with almost guaranteed irrelevance. I may have thousands of people “hearing” it, but… so what? It’s gone, and it’s voice filled over by the thousands of other great one-liners filling your friends list.

Well, how do I change that? How do I create some relevance, some context, some social understanding of the “where” to my “what”? Would it convey more, to more people, for more reasons? Would a simple identifier of place give my shout-out more gravity?

I could do this: “I’m at the barber shop and I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.”

Ok, I had to type out “I’m at the barber shop and” just to make it contextual. Eh. Should be an easier way, right? I mean, there’s a shorthand paradigm for updates, for referring to other people, for mentioning that it’s a forward of someone else’s thought (re-tweet), there’s tagging for relevance (hashtags). Why isn’t there something like a location tag?

So, we were talking at Little Springs about this very idea. I think it was Barbara who brought up the observation that on my personal status updates, different “spheres” of people (friends, acquaintances, family, coworkers, etc.), could all read my content differently if they made any assumptions about the context, and more importantly, the relevance of that content based on their understanding of our relationship. This was very similar to the point made in a talk by Jared Benson at D4M 2008.

It’s a great point: Personally, I have multiple layers of audience that can construe my content with whatever filter they have that is most prominent in our relation. Even time of day or day of week cause us to make assumptions that aren’t always fair, and even presumptive in a manner that can often cause a lot of miscommunication issues. For example:

“Oh, I thought you were at work today when you mentioned in your status update that you wanted to kill someone. Is everything ok at the office?”

Well, no, I was actually at the store, during what would normally be a work hour.

Again, why update at all, why have a window into your world, if you don’t even have enough information for your audience to understand why you’re even saying it? I mean, really, are my status updates, tweets, text messages all just “A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”?

Nope. So let’s fix that. Like this:

^MyBarbershop – I can’t believe I just witnessed such a heinous misstep of personal grooming.

Ahhh, that’s better. The cognitive dissonance has been dissipated. I can see clearly now, the pain of trying to understand the context is gone.

Plus, it’s kinda funny.

So, we’ve outlined the details here about this whole deal. Basically, we need SOMETHING to set the stage for the context. Following the precedent of #subject and @identity, respectively, we’ve chosen to follow suit with ^location.

And, it works! @shoobe01, @barbaraballard and I have been using it for the past few days, figuring out the variables and rules, the refinements and usages. People from all my different “audience spheres” have let me know that using this tagging system actually creates more relevance and understanding of what i’m posting about. It seems pretty obvious to me, actually, but just like Marcel DuChamp, someone just needed to do it first.

So go try it. Read the article we’ve created about it in our design patterns wiki. See if you find that it makes a difference to how you post, and how your audience responds to it. And if you have more thoughts, references or suggestions, it’s a wiki. Add it in.

This report from Strand Consulting has been getting a fair bit of play in blogs and press. Its the one that says the iPhone is not any good for the operators. You have to give them your contact info to get the full report, but it's free.

This all reminds me of the underlying business model for most of my time at Sprint. Or rather, the quest for a business model. Fairly soon after 2G wireless service launched it became clear that mobile was not a totally different beast, but just wireless telephony. Sprint had been around for way over a century as a local, then long distance company.

Even with new models of content (vs. just people talking to each other one way or another), the default path for mobile operators will be the same as that of the wireline services: commoditization. Dial tone will become a commodity, available from any number of competitors, and incremental improvements are fleeting. It doesn't matter "dial tone" changes to internet service, and circuit-switched voice moves to VoIP. They still will become a "dumb pipe," and get paid pipeline operator rates.

Sprint tried to solve this by becoming an entertainment company. Whatever that means. Every operator tries to solve it by constantly questing for the next big network, and many (especially in North America) by locking consumers in with contracts, and restricting handsets to their network. Some effort is also placed in trying to "differentiate" from competitors, but often it's degrees only, or simply restricting (e.g. locking GSM devices to a network) vs. true differences.

Apple's model is worth looking at also. Because it's not too different from what Motorola did in the RAZR era, Nokia gets away with in much of the world, and most other manufacturers aspire to. When a handset is the big coveted thing – basically, any time the man on the street knows what it's called – every operator wants to sell it, and often has to put up with other demands from the manufacturer to get the rights. The content distributed on the handset, the device UI, the pricing and more is more under the control of the manufacturer than usual.

Operators that want to brand their service, or simplify their customer care experience, by adding their own content, offering the same applications and the same UI on each phone, end up with these supposedly profitable, yet annoyingly out-of-place devices in their lineup.

Incidentally, I saw this sort of stuff up close. Sprint didn't carry the RAZR for a long time. It was not dissimilar from the iPhone hype, but soon enough everyone carried it. And Sprint had to live with a much less Sprinty phone than usual. Much the same happened for the StarTAC, only worse. Nokia, similarly, got away with a lot for a long time as well.

All these strategies all short term solutions. I mean both

1. The operator model of exerting their ownership on everything hanging off their network, avoiding real openness and avoiding playing nicely with any other network unless they are required to or get too much bad press, and...
2. The manufacturer model of exerting their ownership on everything hanging off their phone, avoiding real openness and avoiding playing nicely with any other hardware of any sort unless they are required to.

I'll avoid going off for a few paragraphs about the general issue of chasing short term goals and quarterly earnings reports. But regardless, a model has to be found that allows operators to exist, profitably, over decades-long timescales.

Here's where I'd normally say how to solve things. And for individual companies I am sure I have shortish-term opinions, but as a global entity, as a sector, I have no idea. I do have predictions. There are, to me, three likely futures:

1) Failures and Mergers

The worst case is the current model just keeps going with loans and prayer, and eventually an operator fails. I am sure some part of it gets bought, but to global finance, it's a graveyard. Anyone else on the fence suddenly doesn't get an extension on their credit, and dozens, then scores of major operators fail. As you approach one dominant operator per market (country, usually) customers start loosing. Lack of competition on an entrenched product means no price pressure, and the operators charge enough to profit (especially with the debt obligations some take on by absorbing the failed operations) openness initiatives dry up, and lots of innovation with it. Without competitive pressure, do not expect things like new types of networks to go online unless rapid and robust revenue can be made from them. This sort of future could go on and on until something disruptive happened, even if not the best technology, like a satcom provider finally figures out how to be competitive.

2) Multi-Tier Consumption

I can see something not dissimilar to the current setup, with a similar number of competing operators and manufacturers, continuing with a totally different pricing model. Take some of the concepts from Chris Anderson's Free. Even if nothing is actually free, two levels of service, or other models of add ons seem like something that could regularly generate revenue. I don't mean the current system of pricing new, cool things expensively, as that's not sustainable (someday, things have to level off, or lending for those networks will kill everyone, or something) or of over-pricing the services that are cheapest to operate (SMS vs. voice rates in North America make no sense. A favorite crazy thought of mine is to sell add ons to phones, like they do for cars or, more specifically, high-end watches: add a metal case, move from a plastic, to a glass, to a high-grade crystal screen, and so on. A basic level of hardware (or service) is available for a cost low enough to attract everyone, with a fee for extras that do not change much over time. (Note my phone-customization example requires cooperating with handset manufacturers, instead of sorta fighting them).

3) Something else

Seriously, although it's not a thing in itself, I think the result is more likely to be something unforeseen and unpredictable than anything I can dream up. A Kindle-like mode, with a non-phone device using paid-once service, is an example (if pervasive enough) of a disruptive change. There are several technological or market possibilities like this I can come up with, and I am sure a half dozen plausible ones I don't know about.

Regardless, I do not see the current model muddling through for even another decade. There are other trends at work (new networks, embedding networking, the rise of smartphones with increasingly little operator control) exerting other pressures that I see no one talking about as big trends that will influence the whole business. Especially if no one in charge starts realizing how their business really works, it might not be working very soon.

As I've said here, I don't just build systems for myself. And therefore I need to know what everyone else (okay, the likely target users) wants. And more often than not why they want it.

I've always been vaguely aware of fear, uncertainty, and doubt around new technology. But somehow lately I've been more aware of it. Every tech reporter seems to bring up the fear of how anything they are reviewing can be misused. Anything at all. I have met half a dozen people who won't go on Flickr lest someone see their photos. So they email them around, or host on the Kodak service instead?

But somehow the most scary one lately has been location services (or, as everyone calls it "GPS"). This post by Bruce Schneier, quoting the EFF on location privacy is a good example of a narrow technical discussion that implies the inherent scariness of storing and sharing.

I am sure there is something to this scheme (actually, in theory I rather like it) but it helps communicate an inherent fear which I don't get. And I certainly don't want to design maximum restriction around everything, because that will just reduce use of these services. And low-use social services might as well not exist.

I'd like to get more location sharing, myself. I rarely sneak out to smuggle guns to the guerillas or meet my mistress in Argentina (which I presumably want to keep from everyone). But I do work 45 minutes from my house, sometimes. It would be nice if my parents, for one, just knew where I was without having to call and ask how far away I am.

But let's stop talking about location specifically. My impression is that all new things are scary. Until they are not. This post Everything Will Destroy Our Youth has even more funny examples. Like an 1859 quote from Scientific American about how chess is bad for you.

But assuming that our current fear of networked information is more valid, or at least more relevant, it's harder to just blow them off. While typing this, I am arguing with a perfectly tech-loving friend about this very topic. Does networking change everything? Maybe, but for the fact we've been on the internet for a couple decades. When is everyone going to learn how that works and just behave appropriately vs. fearing it all the time?

Latitude, for example, always invites "I don't wanna share my location with everyone" responses when I invite someone. But it doesn't. You already get to pick and choose. Built into the system. (Perhaps the EFF has something where evildoers or Google or the government can see you when they want, but aside from lawbreakers, it's fine).

These perfectly common sense hints about safe text messaging use presumably apply mostly to email, and apply mostly to mail, teletype, telegraph and messengers. Yet, email is pretty accepted and only a bit feared. And I have actually worked on projects where I had to remind people to not automatically print personal information (including passwords) on postcards. It's paper, so it's perceived as not dangerous.

I don't want to wait a few decades for everything to become (possibly inappropriately) perceived as safe. And I don't want to just assume all fears are unfounded, and make everything open and insecure. But I'd like some way to tell what the right approach is without just guessing or using my own opinions.