- how happy and productive you are
- your social status
- your social group

Fundamentally this is just an extension of any form of data mining – take a large amount of data, and try and make some determinations from it.  The examples based on social group and status can be fairly easily explained – by where you spend your time (the types of shop, street, district), and other mobile phones that yours tends to hang out with.  Happiness and productivity was a correlation they discovered when they combined location and call data with questionnaires.

The same group are doing some interesting work with other areas that use mobile data – such as “social serendipity” – trying to match users that happen to be in similar locations, and that have similar profiles or interests.  People have tried to release products into that space for as long as I can remember, but no-one’s yet cracked it, so it will be interesting to see if this research helps.

A lot of reality mining to date has been to do with mobiles (like BlueTooth MyBlogLog), but obviously anything that can sense us and feed data about us will add to this: cars, PCs, toasters… The more, to my mind, the merrier.

Back in “the day” (1995-2000), serving someone a version of a home page based on their location (matched against a database of IP numbers) was state-of-the-art, and really wasn’t always that useful (I still prefer the .com view of google…) 

Now, services like brightkite and loopt will hook you up with your friends who are nearby, or new people who happen to be in the neighborhood of you.  So much for the global village! Also, sites set up to get people away from their PCs, like Meetup.com are going well.  All good.

Bit by bit, the broadcasting, storage and tracking of your physical location is starting to be used for benefit.  Again, years ago there was a lot of talk about SMS geo-targeted marketing, so that when you walked past a restaurant, the reviews would flood your phone – or when you walked in to a shop, discount vouchers would jump into your inbox.  But that was either too intrusive, too scatter-gun (your location was known only to 500 meter accuracy) or if you had to seek them out, too difficult to get.   Now, maybe, the technology is getting there, with GPS phones and satnavs in every hand (useless in buildings, though!).

In fact, growth in use of maps on phones is over 70% in the UK/US, though that’s still from a pretty low base:

It’s a space I’ll be watching closely, and it’s another data feed that could benefit the USER (which, of course, is something I’m mad keen on).