The network is changing

The next step in social new media technology is coming closer it seems. A few years ago, as Global Position Systems (GPS) were becoming cheaper and smaller, thereby more commonplace, it was always envisaged that at some point they would be a built in feature with mobile phone technology.

Back in August, Motorola released the A780 that does just that, and there is also chip development upstream at Texas Instruments that will see even more products come to market during the next few months.

Couple the idea of GPS in a phone, with an idea dreamt up a few years ago which saw the idea fo tagging "virtual" post-it notes to each of the six sides of a cubic metre of available space on the earth, and you have the recipe for yet another step change in social communications with wider society.

The idea is quite simple, you go to a restaurant somewhere, and you think it's awful. As you leave you leave a "virtual" post-it note at the GPS location you are standing in. Your service provider records the data and ensures that any of its customers can see the data when they pass with a certain distance of it.

Just to put this into perspective, it's been calculated that there are, roughly, one hundred billion billion cubic metres of available space for such a service in the world. Allowing for the fact that large parts of that area may well be uninhabited, and allowing then for multiple network providers in multiple countries holding different information, that's a hell of a lot of post-its and no trees killed.

Such a technology, which is currently under development in Scotland and Ireland) has the potential to create another inter-network of disparate information, some good, some bad, where the step between those point will be us with our phones rather than the bits on the copper and optic. We will be the network.