Cohere

Tara "Miss Rogue" Hunt pointed me to one of the most interesting and potentially useful capabilities I have yet seen, Plazes. Plazes locates you from your router connection to where you are in the world and allows people you've assign as friends to see you are there.

This may not seem very interesting. But I see two things currently necessary to make the internet and web powerful:

• Incorporate into the daily work activity regardless of where one -- unshackle from a desk location.
• Computers seamlessly understand people -- rather than people needing to understand computers to fully utilize their capabilities.

These are two of the essential new capabilities I see in what has been tagged "Web 2.0". "Web 2.0" is an unspecified label to which Tim O'Reilly, Richard MacManus, et. al. have been assigning meanings to the coming internet capacities. The genius of a non-specific designation as "Web 2.0" is that it means everything and nothing. So that when new web applications develop that stick with a gestalt formed, looking back "Web 2.0" will have a definite meaning.

What is necessary for the internet to be powerful, is for it to become invisible in our life. To do that it has to adjust to us. For the large part, we still have to adjust to computers to fully leverage them. To use blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, mobile internet capable phones, etc. we need to understand RSS, iTunes, mobile networks, etc. This needs to disappear and the work toward open internet API's, web application that are immediately understood like flickr, mobile devices that are self evident as the iPod are beginning to realize this.

Where I see a location service as Plazes being powerful is in coordinating people's location to where and what others are doing. So that if I'm working on a project at a cafe and need to grab a cable at a computer store. If I locate a friend at Fry's (California computer store) who's heading past me, I can message and ask if he'd pick up that device. Perhaps authorize him to use my paypal up to a certain amount. What this means is that our work and intentions are exponentially leveraged through coordinating with other people's locations.