Is Location The Fifth Dimension?

Cover of A Brief History of TimeThe SimpleGeo Promise

I put out this blog post earlier. And I have been thinking. Your laptop screen is 2D. Your smartphone screen is 2D. But Twitter and Facebook happened before FourSquare happened. The time dimension got added before location ever became a factor. Length and width were the first two dimensions. The third dimension was not spatial, it was time, chronologically speaking, pun intended.

But if you go into 3D computing, the third dimension is not location. Easy math, that would make location the fifth dimension of web tech.

That makes it really, really interesting to me. Location has several sub dimensions. Location can be local, it can be global. Local can be hyperlocal with all its associated richness. When you move from local to hyperlocal, that starts feeling like fractal territory all over again. Blows my mind.

The SimpleGeo Promise

Image via CrunchBaseBefore Einstein the world was 3D. There were the three dimensions of space: length, breadth, height, the usual suspects. You could argue Euclid's world was 2D. Well, old man Einstein came along, and added the time dimension to the equation. And that had huge implications, humongous huge.

I think that whole metaphor is a great way to try to understand contemporary web tech. I just read the name SimpleGeo in a tweet and I saw its promise. I had heard of it before, I think I might even have read a TechCrunch article on it months back.

Data Threesomes

Image via CrunchBase

Chris Dixon: Web Services Should Be Both Federated And Extensible: The next step in this evolution is to create web services that are both federated (APIs) and extensible (Apps)..... The combination of Facebook’s data (social graph and check-ins) and SimpleGeo data/algorithms would create much more advanced feature possibilities than either service acting alone...... a “data threesome” ..... Allowing websites to be federated and extensible will open up a whole new wave of innovation

Two memes have been making the rounds: the web is dead, women in tech.

Chris Dixon, in this post, is referring to mash ups, high level mash ups. He is talking of "data threesomes" and how that would lead to "a new wave of innovation."

Some people have commented saying it is already being done. If it is, it is not mainstream yet.
People have been building APIs upon APIs. There is much data sharing going on, but not entirely enough.

What really matters is the end product, that final interface that the end user interacts with. A simple interface sitting on top of rich data interactions is what you want to shoot for.

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