If, in the augmented reality of the day-after-tommorrow shown in telco commercials, you’re getting directions and suggestions from every wireless-which-way; wouldn’t you rather get them from your friends, than a megacorporation? Jo Walsh would, and luckily for us she’s working on it, as she tells the relaunched WriteTheWeb:
“If location-based, mobile services are going to become essential to my lifestyle, like my mobile phone has, I’d like to have an alternative to near-monopolistic commercial offerings. When I’m walking down a London backstreet and my mobile-of-the-future points out that I might enjoy that beer in that pub over there, I’d rather that was a friend of a friend , and not News International telling me so.”
Maps are power, and power to the people.
Nice.
Jo is going to be presenting this project at ETCON ’03.
Petafloptimism 
Strangely enough, I think the megacorps would like the recommendations to come from your friends rather than as geo-spam-advertising. Largely for 2 reasons.
1 – strangely, the majority of telcos realise this would be bad spam, and unlikely to generate good revenue.
2 – content from your mates is free. which is nice.
; )
I don’t think it’s quite that simple either, Matt.
For one thing, friendship and affinity are not necessarily coterminous.
Some of my closest, dearest friends enjoy video games, Gewurtztraminer, Arata Isozaki, prime rib, Spielberg: things that I wouldn’t touch with the proverbial ten-foot pole. So their recommendations regarding which places/experience I might enjoy would probably have a hit rate under .5, and vice versa – very few of the people I care most about in the world dig the minimal thing in quite the way I do.
If, on the other hand, you solicited recommendations “as if” – “If you were Matt, where would you imagine you might like to go?” – that could be interesting. The false positives would at least provide you with some food for thought that way: “Hmm, I wonder why she thought I’d enjoy this faux-Weimar pinball arcade?”
Collaborative filtering holds forth some promise, a version of which I’ve designed into the moblog/place-tagging system we’re working on, alongside a credibility engine.
I do agree that shotgun-scatter corporate recommendations would conspicuously fail to give me the warm fuzzies.
PS I’m jealous of your progress on your current project. Looks fun. Welcome back.