The world wide web removed a sense of space from our lives by connecting everyone on the globe to the same content — totalitarian regimes excepted. But the web’s most promising developments of late indicate that we’re entering a new phase where place matters as much as reach.
Perhaps there is a “there” here after all, in other words, to corrupt Gertrude Stein’s infamous aphorism. Craigslist, Citysearch, and other veterans have long profited from acknowledging that web surfers live in geographic locations, but only recently has the shift from globalization to localization become a major driver of innovation.
Witness the ongoing rise of the New York company Foursquare, whose primary purpose is to tell people where you are. The service added its millionth user in April and was used by the Wall Street Journal to spread news about the attempted Times Square bombing, proving that it’s not just about becoming the mayor of your local coffee shop. After Entrepreneur named Foursquare the “most brilliant” idea in mobile technology earlier this month, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley said even his team is surprised by the way it continues to grow, over a year after its launch at SXSW 2009.
“Every month, we look at the numbers and think we can’t keep growing at this rate,” said Crowley. “But we do. This thing’s got legs.”
Foursquare requires checking in to locations, but Google Latitude does away with that nicety and broadcasts your location to your friends at all times through your phone. Now that the iPhone supports multitasking, it and other apps that broadcast location passively have the potential to work there, too, providing location-tracking apps with a significant boost.
In other local news, one of the largest providers of ISP routers in the world plans to tag users with anonymous, zip+4 codes so that advertisers can advertise to them locally (or by targeting hundreds of specific neighborhoods nationwide) — even if they’re visiting a general interest website. Our photos and tweets are part of this trend too.
Geo-tagging technology stamps the location where a photo was taken or a tweet was written, forever binding that piece of media to a specific location, so nearby users can access them easily. Flickr was an early supporter of geo-tagging, and as the equipment we use to take photos and send tweets increasingly includes location-aware connectivity if not outright GPS, the trend is set to explode.
People gathered in the same location reading local news: Does that sound like “the world wide web” to you? Laugh at Starbucks’ local content plan if you must, but the company is savvy to tie its well-timed foray into public Wi-Fi to local news. In fact, local news itself, thought to be one of the world wide web’s first casualties, is showing signs of life. The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, Connecticut, and The New York Times‘ Local New Jersey blog, for example, integrated a service called SeeClickFix that allows locals to file quick complaints about potholes, eyesores and other issues that pertain to their town and have them appear on a map so local officials can see where the problems are – something that would have been difficult or impossible the old paper-only days.
Around the country, laid-off and aspiring journalists are experimenting with local-news websites to fill the vacuums left by disappearing paper publications and ignored by national news outlets. Instivate, some of whose staff was was forced out of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (now itself a web-only publication) covers news at the neighborhood level, and similar efforts include TBD, Main Street Connect, AOL Patch and Datasphere.
Longtime newspaper reporter Paul Chavez, whose eight-year stint at the Associated Press ended in 2008, is planning another hyper-local news site, The Venice Dispatch, to cover hot-button issues like where visitors can park their campers, medical marijuana dispensaries and “the nuts and bolts stuff — local council, talking to cops and all the other basic things every day that aren’t being done right now.” The site is still in its early stages, but once it gets rolling, Chavez plans to fund the project with a mix of ads, sponsorships, non-profit donations and voluntary reader payments.
“I’m starting to see some local niche news providers either through blogs or Facebook, but there isn’t a lot of hard journalism out there,” said Chavez, “These [geographical] areas, they do get covered by the big papers like the Los Angeles Times, but it’s not consistent or aggressive because they focus most of their resources on statewide or national news.”
Local news is on the rebound, but perhaps no other market lends itself so clearly to the neighborhood wide web as the one for tools that help you find a good place to eat. Urbanspoon, Yelp, and countless other apps make their money by pointing people not to the best restaurants in the world, but the best in their neighborhoods.
Which would you rather read about — the carne asada tacos for sale just down the street, or the ones on sale in a remote village? In the early days of the web, many of us may have chosen the latter, out of sheer curiosity. Now that the web is no longer a novelty, but has woven itself into the fabric of our lives, the neighborhood wide web often provides more relevant information than the world wide web does, and the web itself is beginning to reflect that shift.
Inside Foursquare: Checking In Before the Party Started (Part I)
Inside Foursquare: Checking In Before the Party Started (Part II)
Top photo courtesy of Flickr/o palsson
