Social networks, sharing and your personal information

The latest wave of social media frenzy is about sharing your location and knowing where your friends are, or have just been.
This is something that I have discussed and presented on many times before. In fact in 2003 I presented proof of concept applications on the Microsoft smartphone platform ( then it was actually called Microsoft Smartphone) and the Microsoft Tablet PC platform. These applications enabled the user to post their current location to a blog or shared feed. I have used a number of variations of this to keep my 'Where was Dr. Neil' page updated.

In the last couple of years the rise in popularity of Facebook and Twitter have lead to an increase of related location sharing services. Services like foursquare or Facebook's own checkin system enable you to share your location with the world. This is great for those occasions where you want everyone to know where you are. These systems are mostly an all or nothing solution, either share with everyone or no one. So when you just want to let a couple of people know where you are located it's is back to the old text message or even resorting to call them.
It is for this reason we built Locus. Locus enables you share your location when you chose and with whoever you chose, including Facebook and Twitter.

I truly believe the pendulum will start to swing the other way now, with private personal information becoming more valuable. This value will start to be realized by the consumer and leveraged by the consumer to their own advantage.

When will you start to take more care of the information you share and who you share it with?

Bing Maps Silverlight Control

This morning I upgraded the Where Was Dr. Neil and the Locus Activity Map web pages to use the released version of the Bing Maps Silverlight SDK.
The upgrade from the CTP took under an hour. There are some minor naming differences, for example the VirtualEarth namespace has been replaced by with a Maps namespace. It is now Microsoft.Maps.xxx which makes more sense.
I believe you only have a few more days to perform the upgrade, and then the CTP service will be shut down.
You will need an account key for each web site on which you host the Silverlight map control. You can get your key by creating an account on the Bing Maps Portal.
Then the key needs to be placed in the XAML when you add a Map to your Silverlight app.
The Silverlight interactive SDK is pretty handy to get you started once you have downloaded and installed the SDK.