Mike Elgan: Google quietly changes the world again

Computerworld - Do you remember where you were the day they unveiled Facebook? No? How about Twitter? Amazon.com? Google Search?

Massive, culture-shifting technologies are almost never recognized as such when first announced. They seem unimportant and peripheral at first, but later we find ourselves relying on them every day.

One such technology was rolled out this week. In all the noise and info-clutter of CES, with its endless announcements of new netbooks, smartbooks, tablets and 3-D TVs -- none of which will change how people live -- few noticed Google's unveiling Thursday of two related location services called "Near me now" and "Explore right here."

"Near me now" is an option that appears in a Google search if you have the right kind of phone (an iPhone or Android phone). It uses the built-in GPS to rank searches based on proximity. So, for example, if you search for "pizza," "Near me now" ranks results based on how close they are to you. Nice, but not that exciting.

"Explore me now" sounds innocent enough in Google's description: "Find out more about a place 'right here' with just a few clicks." The idea is that you can check out the street or the neighborhood to see what restaurants, coffee joints and movie theaters are nearby, and get quick access to reviews, operating hours and showtimes -- that sort of thing.

No big deal, right? Wait until you hear where all this is headed.

Google is building HP's 'Cooltown'

Back in 2001, several stories hit the Net about the development of a concept called "Cooltown Notes." The concept was developed and prototyped by a Bristol University student named Alistair Mann, who collaborated with Hewlett-Packard's labs in Bristol, U.K. Part of the larger "Cooltown" concept at HP, the Notes idea was that messages could be associated with location.

Let's say you eat at a restaurant and want to tell random strangers how great it was. Just step outside, launch an application, and type your review. When you "posted it," you would conceptually post it to that location, invisibly in thin air. In reality, it would simply be made accessible to others standing outside the restaurant. Eventually, HP imagined, there would be a whole parallel Internet of user-generated content based on location.

A year and a half ago, I wrote in a blog post about the development of "virtual graffiti" or "virtual sticky notes" in development at a variety of research laboratories, including at Microsoft, Siemens, Cornell University, the University of Edinburgh and Duke University.

All these companies and universities invested millions in the development of ideas without turning them into products. Google is the company that's rolling it out for real.