I must admit to having a fondness for stupid buddy movies, dating all the way back to Cheech and Chong. While Up in Smoke may be a timeless classic, I’m afraid that Dude, Where’s My Car? and more recently The Hangover are destined to show their age more quickly. Why? Because they’re based on the premise of losing track of where you’ve been, and that’s about to become an obsolete concept. Tiger in the bathroom? Ok. Too wasted to remember getting a tattoo? I can see that. No record of where you where for the past 24 hours? No way! That notion will soon be as outdated as Dr. Evil’s “one miiillion” dollar ransom demand.
Why? Because for starters, our computers know where we are thanks to their IP addresses. The new version of FireFox that was announced earlier this week supports location-aware browsing. And of course our phones know where we are — I’ve spent the past few months working with Google Latitude, Yahoo!FireEagle, Brightkite, Poynt, and numerous other location-based applications available on the iPhone and Blackberry. I’m convinced that our daily comings and goings are sure to be continuously and anonymously tracked, and with our consent, put in a personalized and social context. And with the next generation of cars bundling in wireless telematics, it’s not just our computers and our phones that will be continuously tracked.
We’re already seeing stories like “Kidnapped Woman Saved By Misplaced BlackBerry” and this hilarious adventure involving “Lego, a dive bar, and some fast urban walking“. Location is fast becoming the latest datatype in the growing trend toward the real-time Web. Location streams are the new click streams. They’re a goldmine of information to be captured, crunched, analyzed, and turned into advertising and retail profit.