Much has been written about the Apple + Google Covid-19 Exposure Notification framework. This is the software that is now part of Android and iOS (13.5+) and powers Covid-19 detection apps for Android and iPhone like COVID Alert (much of Canada), COVIDWISE (Virginia) and dozens of other jurisdictions around the world . I’m in Ontario and use COVID Alert on my iPhone 8 Plus. The apps are fantastic pieces of work from the Canadian Digital Service and its private sector partners Shopify and BlackBerry.

Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that: users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don’t mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone – this is consistent with Scoble’s belief in the end of privacy carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web – they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so – why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?

Now that the f8 keynote has passed, everyone is wondering why Facebook didn’t launch a check-in feature. The reality is that check-ins are just a hack – a workaround for the fact that smart phones are still pretty dumb when it comes to location – at least in terms of the features that App developers can freely use. Smarter devices, near-field communication (NFC), better applications and more savvy advertisers are going to revolutionize how we go about our daily business.

Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference. Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community.

foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can: identify what city the user is in read/write user and friends’ check-in data look up information for a particular location make/send friend requests retrieve venue data perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins add venues, tips, and to-dos This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are?