Tobler's first law of geography states that the closer places and people are to each another, the more similar they are or are likely to be. This Newtonian-inspired law and universal truth for the physical world of geography has equally held true for human, geopolitical, and socioeconomic geographical patterns. The doctrine may soon need rewriting though.  Social networking applications of a flat, connected, instantaneous, and networked-world of social and human collaboration are beginning to challenge the principle.

I recently spoke with Shane Lennon, SVP Strategy & Marketing at GyPSii about their location-enriched social networking & publishing service now available on devices offered by Garmin, Samsung, and Ramar. Six months following their launch, Gypsii is on its way to plotting a future where mobile users record life events, with subsequent social butterfly effects ripping across the globe at blink-of-an-eye Internet speeds, bringing people closer together in time and place continuum's.  Gypsii use-cases range from northeastern US users contributing awe affinity to a post by a Norwegian user documenting a blizzard that dumped over 20ft of snow on Strynevatnet and the surrounding area... to citizens in China documenting the May 12 Sichuan Province earthquake well ahead of AP and other mainstream press coverage.  Citizen entries by Thomas Wa and Peter Wang following the devastating 8.0 quake depict a shattered world of loss, recovery, and hope, with stunning photos on location.  These amatuer observations were picked-up by mainstream press and shared instantly and globally which subsequently elevated hyper-localized awareness that lead to a pouring of social support and an influx of humanitarian aid from around the world. 

Gypsii's use cases prove that these kinds instantaneous power-of-place publishing and social networking services not only challenge Tobler's first law but also serve a better good, enabling communities of participants to exchange geographic knowledge across geographic and cultural boundaries, connecting the once disconnected through common sharing and affinity.  Tobler acolytes, anthropologists, and geographic information scientists... perhaps it's time to rethink older-era fundamental teachings.

One of the things we (meaning the LBS community) talked about in the early days of 911, was using call log histories to improve wireless coverage.  The idea is simple.  Take identity-ridden, non-intrusive logged caller locations (which include signal strengths) and create an interpolated GIS model to then isolate under served areas denoted by weak signals in a continuous field- red being strong, yellow being weak.  We saw this GIS modeling work as an opportunity to replace expensive drive-by systems used at the time by mobile operators to improve their coverage and optimize service.  While the idea was noble, it never took.  All the carriers we worked with just let the data hit floor and it was swept away into dust bins or saved only for odd court-issued subpoenas.  What a waste.

Since then, lots of folks have caught on to the idea that anonymous logged mobile locations in any transaction context can be used for all sorts of modeling and new data creation.  From traffic models to isolating target-rich advertising zones, modeling based on post-transaction analytics and business intelligence is the new trick of the Google era. 

Researchers at Northeastern University are with it (I think most around the world are.  City University in London was doing this in the late 90s).  Northeastern recently used 100,000 anonymous mobile locations to map social patterns of geographic interaction.  No surprise - we humans are for the most part sedentary creatures, staying within 20 miles of our homes (begs the question why we need TomTom's!).  Researchers hope to extend the data findings into epidemiological analyses and use it in a similar context to John Snow's famous cholera outbreak analysis map of central London produced in 1854.  It's good to see this advanced GIS work finally happening with LBS...