I SPY WITH MY LITTLE EYE...
This follows the last post "A Penny for your thoughts", which touched on the interesting power of user annotation on newspaper content on the web. The post was illustrative of the potential power of organic, bottoms up user created content that can potentially be more compelling than most top-down corporate content efforts. The unpredictability of how consumers can use web service platforms has already been shown over the last decade, when a service like eBay initially was used to trade Beanie Babies, and has been used for all sorts of unimagined goods and services since then. We're now seeing that kind of innovation ACROSS web service platforms.
Less than two days after Google showed off the integration of its Keyhole satellite photo company acquisition from last fall into its Google Maps service, users have already started to innovate organically on this functionality. But the interesting thing is this innovation is occurring on Flickr, a photo tagging and blogging service bought recently by Yahoo! An early example was someone annotating Google's satellite maps on Flickr, showing the world their favorite childhood spots in the neighborhood...or this one with a tongue-in-cheek artificial bird's eye tour of the United Kingdom...or something as pedestrian as this fellow's walk down his block. You can see more using this Memorymap tag on Flickr. A more practical example of this integration is this set of directions from JFK to Manhattan in a traditional map view and in a satellite view when you click on the "satellite" button" on the upper right.
Satellite images on maps on the web isn't new...AOL had introduced satellite maps with its Mapquest unit for a short while last year, and Microsoft has had its experiment with Terraserver for a while. Even Amazon has gotten into the act a few months ago with a street-side photo based Yellow Pages. And none of these services have shown any real path to monetization. (For those who want a deeper overview of satellite image services on the web, here is a good place to start).
What's more interesting is what happens when services like Flickr, with its tagging system, offers users the opportunity to make this content their own...scribble on it, and share it with the world, or just their friends and family. You can very well imagine people tagging their digital camera, cell phones and PDA camera images on maps like these and sharing it with friends and family to share their travel experiences, vacations and the like. An experiment along these lines using Flickr (again) is shown here by MAPPR. Here's another example of how families can share their travel experiences on Travelpost.
This is all very different than what many cell phone carriers have long planned for their geo-location services. But the surprise may be that consumers and entrepreneurs organically roll their own services, using a patchwork of services from the next generation of consumer web technologies. It may be a case of cellco eyes being smaller than the stomach for a change...
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