LBS: Time and Space Merge

I never ceased to be amazed by the power of flight. Just seven hours ago I was near Washington DC and now I am in Mountain View CA. Only 160 years ago, it took the better part of a year and maybe your life to travel across the United States. When I am high above the clouds looking down at the earth, I like to think, “Julius Caesar never flew to Hawaii.”
This bridging of space through travel is increasingly being mastered, but we are still in the dark ages as far as space goes. Consider time, on the other hand. Technology has quietly brought time to the point where virtually every single digital device we have relies on it in some form or another. Time, as in date and time, marking a precise time in space, is tracked, logged, captured in all computers and most applications, on VCRs, on bus schedules, via appointments. We are all synchronized in time.
We all know that location based services are coming down the road, but few of us can truly imagine the impact. Where we now can mark our point in time, we will soon be able to mark our point in space as well. Location permeates everything we do, whether it is a time zone, or being “at home” or “in the office”. “Presence” is nothing more than a declaration of whether or not you are at a certain point. AIM can tell you whether your friend is at the computer, the phone, or neither. Appointments, bus schedules, dinner with the family all merge space and time into one point. I have not even mentioned GPS.
Soon we will talk about “space management” just as we refer to “time management”. They go hand in hand. When imagining a future with location, just imagine the present with time, and where a time and a place intersect (which happens to be everywhere, according to Einstein), you will have a “new” application for a location based service. As we are now synchronized in time, so shall we be synchronized in space as well.