Exporting the past into the future, or, “The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present” « Magical Nihilism
http://magicalnihilism.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/exporting-the-past-into-the-future-or-the-possibility-jelly-lives-on-the-hypersurface-of-the-present/

Context and scale, past and future.

Matt Jones's current thoughts on location-based services and the value of "nearish" over "here".

Matt Jones of dopplr de-bunks the b-chino'd hype surrounding in the moment location based apps. Love it.

Perhaps the idea of showing where you are exactly now isn't so good afterall - it's more relevant to talk about where I'll be soon so you can react to it accordingly.

Earlier Matt Jones posting, more mind-bending moments, particularly on the highly temporal value of high resolution location data.

It's the ad served while you are reading the news in the morning on an e-reader that knows you're at home and three blocks from a Starbucks. It's a loyalty program on your phone that, through a hotel-room sensor, sets the lights and thermostat and turns the TV to CNN when you walk in the door. It's finding a restaurant in a strange city on a Tuesday night, discovering that a store nearby stocks the TV you're looking for, or that a certain grocery on the way home has the cut of meat you need.

Forget Foursquare or Gowalla: Soon every website and service will be able to tell where you are, opening up the floodgates for location-based marketing and blurring the budget lines for advertisers.

[RRW] Case studies, usage examples on location-based social networking

As good as a description I've read RT @marshallk: Why We Check In: Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks http://bit.ly/d6yJjv