“You are here.” How many of us have scrutinized this inadvertently philosophical assertion when wayfinding in the subway or at the zoo, mall or amusement park? The X designating one’s location vis-à-vis other highlights on the map is practically the universal symbol for being slightly lost. In my experience, it always seems to have little to do with where I feel I am, or where I wish I were, or where I thought I had finally arrived. All manner of perspectival negotiation of the 2-D maze of lines and dots before me ensues: moving in closer, tilting my head to align the landmarks with my sightline, squinting so as to project myself onto the smaller plane of impervious reality before me.

A cartoon check on Google reassured me I’m in good company finding humor in the incongruity between my existential self and this confident cartographic depiction of it. But a really funny thing has happened recently while navigating our way to the forum—or big box or nightclub. Something dislodged this incongruity, this mismatch between our selves and our public maps. Location awareness has become the new “there there” of our digital devices, and not just of the mere 17% of phones that are GPS-enabled (as of late 2007, pre- 3G iPhone). Low- and mid-tier mobile phones and PNDs (personal navigation devices) have been serving up location awareness to millions.

Google’s MyLocation, for instance, has been bringing cell tower-triangulated location awareness to non-GPS phones for about a year, and just upgraded the service so the pale blue circle of your likely location is smaller, and for urban areas, it’s a dot of on-the-block precision.

Location awareness, in case its killer app-ness is initially lost on you, means the navigator is embedded in the map. That inscrutable X that once stood for you is now the real-time longitudinal and latitudinal (and sometimes altitudinal) equivalent of you. And if that isn’t enough of a kick for the navigation-challenged, or the socially mobile (as it were), the map in which you are embedded can be populated exclusively by the geo-information in which you’ve indicated interest. So the world arrays itself around you and your immediate needs and desires as if you were Zeus on a daytrip.

The digitally prescient have been talking about this paradigm shifter for some time—how web surfing is giving way—or at least sharing the stage with—world surfing. We in the RI:Lab have been studying the macrotrend of Cartocracy for months. But brands might be wondering what the heck these apps and maps offer that their store locators don’t. We’ll need a few WeThink posts to answer that one but, for now, here’s a handy list of five reasons a new kind of X marks the spot, and how mega value creation is sure to follow.

1. We, the people, are the reason for the map! Historically, maps have served as political instruments due as much to what they left out as to what they laid claim to by way of depiction. If a mountain range were included as part of the empire’s map, it must be so. (Or, as French philosopher Jean Baudrillard would say, “the map precedes the territory.”) Certainly maps well before our GPS-enabled times rarely included individuals and their personal reference points. How impertinent it would have been to think our being there, specifically, somewhere on the map, mattered when empire-building was at stake! No longer. Today’s digital maps put us literally at the center, and bring their various objects—be it friends or restaurants or Wikipedia tidbits (through the handy mashup Wikinear, which runs on Yahoo’s Fire Eagle geo platform) or our own at-home security and electronics systems (with iControl) into relationship with us.
2. Static maps give way to mapping. Temporality is added to spatiality. GPS satellite and cellular network tower signals help us pinpoint not only our real-time location but our actual movement to our destination—and possible impediments such as traffic jams. Social navigation apps like Citysense or Loopt show the flow of the crowd and whereabouts of friends. It’s a “We are here” world (Citysense uses GPS and WiFi positioning data from the last few years plus real-time feeds and Loopt uses GPS) that some argue restores a bit of spontaneity to our overscheduled lives.
3. Maps evolve constantly. People contribute to the so-called social maps and mapping apps by populating them with geotags, including the popular push pins, geograffiti, and even venue reviews. Maps of yore were intended to last--and often did last--unchallenged for centuries. The twelve minutely detailed copper plates making up the Pianta Grande di Roma ("Great Plan of Rome") date to 1748 but continued to be used as the basis for government maps of the city until the 1970s!
4. Geo-capability drives appetite. The more physically accurate and information-rich our digital maps and mapping applications become, the more people expect them to constitute a complete “mirror world,” as the gamers call it. What are the consequences of being left out of this mirror world? Do you or your company, in some ways, matter less, off the grid?
5. Our cartographic consciousness grows and our sense of shared place is sharpened. Remember the third place, after home and work, that coffee shop or bookstore where people gather to reconstitute a public or shared social space? Welcome to the fourth space: a fusion of virtual and real, where people oscillate between digitally co-existing in a geo-annotated space and the heightened possibility of suddenly meeting up. This is the preferred world order of GPS-based games like Playce, of course.
6. There’s money in them thar coordinates. Hot on the heels of the GPS-enabled 3G iPhone is Google’s long-awaited Android, making its debut tomorrow, with geo apps aplenty. Google’s deep development resources might make Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers’s $100m backing of the over 1700 iPhone applications (to date) look downright conservative.

More mapping mania to come!

Tagged as: mobile, networked, technology, trends

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