Usability Blog – Consequencing

I don’t

Geode, the Mozilla goe-tagging project, has been announced. This will use mobile, wi-fi and user-input technologies to tell a website where you are and offer appropriate content. This all reminds me of a terrifying book I read a year or so ago called Ambient Findability by Peter Morville. Peter Morville was co-author of Information Architeture for the World Wide Web. This book is a tremendous resource for findability. However, the book Ambient Findability has nothing to do with Findability. Findability is the ability of a user to find content after arriving at a website. Ambient Findability is the ability of the internet to know where you are at any moment in time.

So what is the point of all this? What great benefit does this happen to the user? Apparently, if I hit a new town, I can take out my laptop, and it will tell me where there’s a cafe nearby.

Am I missing something here? Why not just ask someone? Would you reveal your location to a website just to find a cafe in a new town?