Groups

In peer-to-peer Location-based Social Networking (tm), Groups are the basic unit for sharing experiences about places. Groups usually form to share experiences over particular areas - like a weekend tour of Virginia’s wineries or a flea market in Washington, DC.

Once a Group is formed, people connect to it through invitation - the thought is that invitation-based Groups increase the chances of developing a trusted network to share digital pictures, notes and location content.

Once the Group is online and active it connects people who want to get connected, and develops over time as more location content is shared from one peer in the CarbonCloud to another.

In a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, experiences can even be shared within a Group as they are occurring - opening up the potential for Group-based "live" situational updates from emergency workers, roving travelogues from friends on vacation, simple Group-based tours of a Digital Community and many other modes of sharing content in the peer-to-peer network.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by The Carbon Project.

Places

We could probably get very complicated in our description of Places but for this discussion let's simply say -

Places are where people have experiences.


To describe an experience at a place you might want to note a few things -

- where it happened

- when it happened

- what happened or (probably more interesting) how you felt

- a picture, maybe a video or even an audio recording

- who you are and who are the people that you want to share the experience with.

These concepts are easy to describe in words, harder to implement in a software framework and even more challenging to implement in a peer-to-peer (P2P) framework designed to allow people to share and find experiences about places.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by The Carbon Project.

Democratic Access

The emergence of the Internet has started a new age of information sharing. This new age is already challenging classic business and social conventions in the entertainment industry where e-commerce and file sharing are emerging as dominant factors in distributing music and video media content – and there’s no reason to think this trend can’t be applied to "location content" as well.

We use the term location content to highlight that information with a location element can be treated in the same flexible manner as images, music and video content on the Internet.

As we all know, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have all started providing different kinds of location content to consumers and technical folks alike through mapping services, allowing a bit more "democratic" access to location-based content.

But I suppose the Google, Yahoo and Microsoft approach is to own as much data as money can buy. However, another approach is to facilitate the viewing and sharing of any location content available in the new Internet democracy, wherever (or whoever) it comes from.

Once new tools are available to view and share any location content, I think enhanced social networks will emerge; people will interact with each other while seamlessly using any location content to describe the places they are meaningful to them. Once this sharing starts, I think we'll find that we're all probably much more connected than we think.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by The Carbon Project.

CarbonCloud

When talking about people and places the first thing that comes to mind is we're all probably much more connected than we know.

To help explore these connections The Carbon Project will roll out CarbonCloud (tm) in the next few months. CarbonCloud is the world's first peer-to-peer (P2P) framework designed to allow people to share and find experiences about places.

That said, there's alot to do and I hope to share some of my thoughts on the concepts of place, experience, connectedness, and to get your thoughts and ideas as well.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2006 by The Carbon Project.