When the internet was born, people marveled at the way you could use it to talk to people all over the globe. Except for language (and technology) barriers, it was as easy to send an email to someone in Sri Lanka as next door. For years the internet was all about globalization.
Now the internet is becoming more local- MySpace has been a forerunner in this aspect, making it easy (well, sort of) to find friends near you. More and more companies are incorporating geolocators into their sites, and sites like Flickr have local groups for almost everywhere. (Lincoln even has one)
This article has an interesting quote:
“If you are looking for a plumber or a pizza parlor, you don’t want one 3,000 miles away,” Semel says. “You want your search to be customized just for you.”
For years and years I wanted to use the internet as a phone book, but I was forced to drag out my paper phone book again and again because the information just wasn’t there on the web. It’s just now getting to the point that I can get an almost as complete listing through yahoo that I can get through the phonebook.
It’s all exciting to me. I, too, marveled at being able to talk to people all over the planet, and I still do, but I also increasingly want to find people near me that I can connect with, perhaps even go out to lunch with. I think people are realizing more and more that there’s only so much interaction that can take place through a computer- eventually, you wanna meet.
I happily envision the day when I can do a search constrained, by, say, 5 blocks and find people that share some of my interests. It’s going to change how we meet people on a very basic and fundamental level. It’ll give shy people a tool to overcome the hardest part of human interaction- the introduction. Maybe there would be a neighborhood chat room where you can see if anyone’s up for a game of softball right now.
I can see how this would be a bad thing, too. If I constrain my search to, say, people that are interested in art, I might not find people that I would otherwise get along great with. I think there will be ways around this, though.
Just one more thing to be excited about. :)