Cellphone Straitjacket Is Inspiring a Rebellion
Man, I do hope that is true. I really hope the capabilities for phones open up soon. While I am very excited with my current phone, and it accomplishes all I need it to, I still want to be able to upload my own custom ringtones without buying a cable, and I still want actual IM clients and not repurposed text-message-based software. I’m already paying extra for unlimited text messaging, can’t we dispense with this ‘cheaty’ method, Verizon?
Maybe I should just move to japan for the sole reason that they have kick-ass cellphones there. ;)
What I really want (on an ordinary phone) is to be able to convince all my friends to enable gps tracking and install one of the cool softwares available currently for pc-like phones that lets you post pictures to your friends from your current location that appear on a map, say what you’re doing there, etc.
It really geeks me out to think I could, say, go to Mongo’s in Royal Oak and have friends pop in who happened to be in the area and checked their map to see who was around.
Something like GeoTwitterFlickr Mobile?
Sounds like an interesting concept, but I can see it being a privacy nightmare, too. I’m really getting to the point where I want to throw strong crypto at a bunch of Personal Area Network applications.
Maybe, but honestly, assuming it’s not associated with my real name or home address, I don’t really care, personally. I can’t find the particular post in the OReilly Radar about it, unfortunately, but there is a (windows mobile) application that does this sort of thing already.
I’m not particularly private with my data (other than typically important ones like ssn, address, birth date).
To be fair, I probably just play too much in the way of Cyberpunk-style games where having applications that allow you to be tracked virtually to your physical location tends to be a Bad Thing :-)
On the surface this seems like a good idea, but I have to agree that it would be a privacy nightmare and an invitation for drama. For instance, I like Ann Arbor. I have lots of friends in Ann Arbor. Sometimes when I go there to visit one friend I don’t tell another. I’d hate to think about people having the means to know that I’m in the area and getting all butthurt because I didn’t call. I think this sort of thing would come up a lot in real life applications of the technology.
Well, I’ve already seen an application of that sort of technology on windows mobile cells, just not on ordinary cells. From what I read, it is fairly simple to go “invisible”. This is something you’d have to choose to use, just like facebook or myspace.
It’s exactly the same as being on AIM – some people are very private, and only come on AIM in invisible, so they have the power of deciding who to talk to.
I don’t specifically “not tell” particular friends, but I am almost always going into one particular town or another in order to see one specific person. I can see how you would want that particular bit of privacy, but I have to say that I don’t have that kind of drama.