Location Caret Tags
From MobileDesign
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[edit] Overview
The "^" (caret) tag provides the ability to add human-readable location to simple status updates. Currently, suggested in cases where the author wishes to provide contextual relevance to information posted on the internet, or other networked interchange.
[edit] Concept
- At the Design for Mobile 2008 conference hosted by Little Springs Design, Jared Benson of Punchcut presented a talk entitled Presence & Mobility. Since then, the folks at Little Springs Design have been discussing these points and the possibilities inherent within the realm of social networking and communication of ideas within social structure.
- There are limitations of "contextual relevance" inherent to the 140 character limit of status updates (140 character SMS / Twitter maximum, but longer on other social networking sites i.e. Facebook, MySpace, et al). In our discussions at Little Springs Design, we became inspired by the notions presented by Jared Benson regarding Social Spheres (in essence, "Circles of Friends"), and how we understood that different groups of friends, family, coworkers, etc, would comprehend status updates depending upon their relation to the person making the update. By volunteering a "location tag" to a status update, these circles would have a more clear contextual reference to the update without making assumptions or misconstruing relevance based upon their own closeness (relationally first, by proximity after) to person making update.
- By allowing this sort of signifier to set the context of the status update, there is actually a social shorthand created in the same spirit and function as a "#" or "@" in relating the message to a much more effective level, and in a succinct manner. Our solution is the "^", for example: ^office, ^home, ^ontheroad, etc.
[edit] Why the caret?
The "^" is can be typed on computers with US-English keyboard layouts by typing Shift+6. Entry method obviously varies on mobile devices, but is under the symbol library on all that we have checked so far.
Although the Caret have been applied to other written usages wikipedia article on it, and has a small symbolic mnemonic as an arrow up, we are applying it in the same spirit as it has as an indicator of "conventional north," (as on a compass or map) and a visual representation as a "flag" to denote location. In essence, a point on a social map.
[edit] When to use it
- Similar to notion of hashtags as a social shorthand, but understandable to anyone who already knows what you mean (contextual relevance) and reliant upon real-world terms (office, home, bank, etc) that are related to real-space of the author.
- When short text communications or tags about other communications (images, videos) are dependent on a location. For example: A status update would refer to ^office when mentioning where to go for lunch, or ^home when mentioning that the cat just made a mess.
- When tagging photos on any social network or blog (In the example of Flickr which offers a location tag: a faster way with the same benefits of privacy and social-specificity is instead to caret-tag).
- When tagging blog posts. Instead of any "location assignment" the system may offer, the caret-tag can be used to create a broader generalized grouping that is non-specific, i.e. ^work or ^office instead of stating specifically the location of your work or office for privacy and consistency.
- Anyplace items can be tagged, at all.
[edit] Form: How to use it
The entire construction is a single "tag." Each tag is composed of the location tagging marker (the caret symbol), followed by a named location.
Alternative formats, such as placing a space or hyphen between the two elements, are discouraged. The named location should, syntactically, be a single word. If the location has more than one word, simply remove spacing. Camelcase (GreatClips) or simple run-together (greatclips) is preferred to underscores or hyphens.
For messaging applications (SMS, Twitter) the preferred location is as the first element in the message body. This sets the context for the rest of the message.
Optionally, you may separate the tag from the body with a character, such as a hyphen. Be sure to leave a space between the end of the location tag and the separator, to assure searches operate correctly:
The use of more than one tag is strongly discouraged. Use the specificity for the location that best meets the current needs, instead of using multiples. There is not currently an agreed-up method for displaying multiple-orders of information in a single entity. For example, a street address has specific location, but for that to be clear, the city and state, district or province must also be displayed.
While technically plausible, the above is difficult to read and very long. Alternatives are sought. This is discussed further under Naming of Places, below.
Multiple, tightly-coupled concepts can be communicated with one tag. For example, travelling may have a location of travelling, of a location currently being travelled through, or of a road name. Adding the destination (or origin) adds more useful information. These may be simple added as suffixes, or separated with a hyphen, slash or other character. Again, do not use spaces in order to keep the tag a single, contiguous entity for readability and searching.
Times may also be added to these, when they are critical to understanding the nature of the location. See examples in the section later for some of these.
[edit] Naming of places
Caret tags comprise a folksonomy. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. It is therefore up to the user to generate names of locations.
Always keep in mind that this system is based on social contexts. Consumers of your information need to understand the tags that you type. Generalized terms such as ^home, ^office, ^bank, etc offer contextual view for your audience as a signifier of location. They convey full meaning to those who know you, but don't give away specifics that would compromise privacy to those who do not know that information anyway.
Terminology may be as general or specific as the author deems necessary, depending upon need for readers to be exposed to such information.
Be sure tag names are spelled correctly, within the confines of allowable formatting. This will enable others to understand the tag, and for search tools to work well. Use names common enough for others to understand. Excessively specific names, local abbreviations or colloquialisms will help convey specific senses to locals, but will confuse others. Select names based on your audience. If Twittering to a dozen friends, use any shorthand you wish, to three-thousand global followers of your professional work, generally-known terms are mandated.
Specific terms such as ^KansasCity, ^HomeDepot, ^OMalleys, etc, added to updates/posts/photos signify something historic or "call out" publicly in real time one's location, providing even more contextual relevance.
Named locations should generally be physical, or representative of physical locations. It should not be used for anything where the comment or item tagged is equally relevant regardless of the current physical location of the posting individual. It is plausible to tag locations in literally virtual space, as long as these are generally understood and reasonably persistent. Locations within Second Life or other virtual worlds may be relevant. Conventional internet locations can be best handled with existing URI notation methods.
[edit] Geocoded Locations
Formal location systems are slightly too difficult to decode by humans, take up lots of space and otherwise seem to be not appropriate for this tagging system. Conventional grid systems (lat/long, UTM, etc.) are not likely to have much demand, so will not be discussed further at this time.
Addresses have problems mostly in that they are very long. This is the shortest conventional method of writing a typical street address in the US:
Adding a postal code would be longer still, and in many other countries addition political districts must also be included. A better solution for most uses is the generalized tagging (^home) with the built-in specificity by social proximity as discussed elsewhere.
In some cases, specific addresses may be valuable, so the best format for such addresses is still an open issue. Even vague addresses, such as city and state in fact display two orders or tiers of information, and seem to violate the common intent of the tag name, as well as being possibly hard to decipher.
[edit] Precision and privacy
At the current time, this is much more secure than any other location service in one critical manner: it is entirely manually entered. If there are privacy concerns (e.g. stalkers or government agents are trying to find you) then the location tag can be eliminated with less effort than using it.
It can, alternatively, be used with additional degrees of vagueness. Most towns have many, many coffee shops, so communicating ^coffeeshop instead of ^Henry'sOn8th gives you a significant degree of locational privacy while still offering a contextual tag for the posting.
There is, of course, no auto-location detection technology to apply to this tagging feature, and would have to be done manually and at the discretion of the author. There is, therefore, one level of precision for any one item tagged.
There is no privacy-filtering technology to apply to this tagging feature. All recipients get the same information. If the location is private, or could reveal private information based on the rest of the post, it is up to the user to filter themselves.
Note, this is not opt-out privacy in the conventional sense. Since nothing is auto-generated, it is essentially the privacy model of the hand-written post card. The contents are visible to casual observation, so the composing party should only include information which, if compromised, is not damaging.
A possible risk is in using such a system while others are also engaged. For example, Google Latitude or similar high-specificity location indicators do not display the relevance of any specific location. If a user had access to both this and caret-tagged information either in real time or time-coded to synchronize, they could determine this information (e.g. where home is). This does not seem to be a high risk currently, and might be alleviated with some concepts discussed in the Future section below.
[edit] Examples
Examples discussing privacy and contextuality of location information:
Barbara sent this out around the time I got home from work (I have a 45 minute drive each way). So in this case, it didn't just communicate that this was her office desk, but that she was still at work, and with the listing of equipment, probably in it for the long haul. The location of "office" is not obscured (secret) but instead listed this was easy to read. Office vs. home has implied meanings, and the location of the office is easily found.
MCRC is the name of a private club of sorts, whose location they like to keep somewhat secret. Friends of mine know where it is, and what it means I am doing. For those who don't know what it is, it's meaningless, and no secret information has been revealed. Perfectly good location-contextual information for those who need to know, no information to speak of for everyone else (googling "MCRC" will not get you the right info).
KVC is our current agency for foster and adoption work. We've been messing with this for years and years, with no result. Everyone we know is aware of these struggles as we talk about it a lot. Here, KVC as a location tag has immense meaning, not just that we're in a meeting at a specific location, but that it's in this whole category, without adding other tags or explaining it. Those who don't know what it means probably don't care, but googling "KVC" will immediately reveal the correct information, and not much cleverness past this can reveal our actual street address. But that's okay, as it's not secret per se.
A few examples of using the Caret-tag in specific updates:
I'm at Henry's, everyone in my circle of friends and coworkers knows I love the place, Lawrence residents know it by this name as well, people outside of the area understand that "There's a place in Lawrence with a barrista named Alicia who makes great coffee drinks". This tag specifies that I am at Henry's, right now, enjoying the drink Alicia made.
I'm at the Roller Derby bout, and this update is only going to convey a lot more than if i'd just put the score up, since just the score would convey much less, to fewer people. People further out of my circle understand that i'm a derby fan (promoting the sport as well), instead of just the closer circles that know it already. Plus, others reading updates in crowd know i'm there and possible meet-ups can occur.
More of a social "Call out", providing location and incentive. For same reasons as above examples, close friends and residents know The Bottleneck, and circles farther out get a better glimpse into the activity.
A few examples of using the Caret-tag in referential or time-relevant updates:
By utilizing the /toJoplin to supplement the location tag of the message, audience reads even more relevance into the trip i'm currently taking. Could be used as just ^driving, but this way the specific direction and general timetable of trip is understood by audience.
Location = my office, but earlier today. Something happened that I want to relay to my audience, but I didn't to it at the time. The clarification of Earlier specifies that this is only relevant to someplace, and that it happened in earlier in the day.
Inverse (and using the different syntax of "/" to separate location/time) of the above example in that he clarification of /tonight specifies that this is only relevant to someplace, and that it happens later in the day.
[edit] Future
- Hopes for automatic location sensing (server based, so desktop twittering, etc. can still grab the handset location, and so on).
- Theory of conversion to a macro tag, ^loc; (or similar, TBD) will be auto replaced with location derived from sending device, or network capabilities.
- Automatic vagueness; specificity (street address) only for places named by user (and therefore selected as shareable locations), else cities, regions, etc. as selected by user on setup.
- Far future, rant on old theories of hypermedia with bidirectional communications, plus auth schemes; each recipient of a twitter-like service can get a custom refill with specificity as needed.
[edit] References
- On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever - By Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley, August 2009 - White paper from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. This paper avoids a number of issues with location for paid services, but a service like that outlined above where the tagging is expressly anonymized and high-precision data does not need to be shared or stored with anyone (typically) would seem perfect for it.
- A modest proposal for more microstructure - Stowe Boyd, May 2009 - An alternative, though not exactly overlapping, method of marking locations in short messages like Twitter. This does promote the use of the initial escaping character as a closing character, allowing multi-word phrases.
