Sunday, May 01, 2011

Is Location The Fifth Dimension?

Cover of "A Brief History of Time"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.

And social is not one of the five dimensions. Social is a reality on its own. Social can inhabit any of those five dimensions. Now you know why Mark Zuckerberg is smiling.
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