Last week I launched @SutMobLib, a Twitter account that tweets the location of Sutton’s mobile library in real time. No, I’m not sitting here all day sending messages. A program does that automatically. Every time the library gets to a new stop it posts up its location.

@SutMobLib on Bing Maps Twitter Search

The utility of such a thing isn’t immediately obvious. While I don’t like to generalise or assume too much, I suspect that the vast majority of mobile library users don’t use Twitter. So far a grand total of nine  people have signed up to follow @SutMobLib and most of those are various sock puppets of mine.

@SutMobLib on Tweetie 2 "nearby search" for iPhone

Unlike most Twitter accounts that belong to real people, @SutMobLib isn’t great for conversation. It’s even less intelligent and interactive than it looks. Anyone that wants to be reminded when the library is visiting their neighbourhood would be better off just putting the relevant day in their calendar.

@SutMobLib is useful because Twitter is now more than just a social network connecting people. It’s become a platform for realtime geospatial information, where things like the mobile library can post up what they’re doing and where they’re doing it, as they’re doing it.

Experienced Twitter users know that while half the power of Twitter is following people you’re interested in and conversing with them, the other half is reading realtime searches for keywords, phrases and hashtags. Recently, Twitter enhanced the power of its search by allowing members to post up their precise geographical location with each tweet, which other members can then discover by searching around an area rather than around a hashtag or topic.

So Twitter has become a radar. Tweetie 2, a Twitter client for the iPhone, allows users to search “Nearby” based on the user’s current location and shows a map covered with plotted tweets. Web users can do something similar using Bing Maps’ Twitter Search. The popular client TweetDeck shows pop-up maps underneath geotweets.

Realtime geospatial search brings a new dimension to finding out about the world. For the first time we can pull up live information about a place, whether that’s people’s conversations and observations or the solipsistic self-reporting of things that tweet like Sutton’s mobile library. Various urban annotation and virtual graffiti projects have existed before now but Twitter brings this capability to a mass-market social network with tens of millions of members. Through reading conversations about coffee in Soho or chemo at the Royal Marsden Hospital, our awareness of the world around us just got a great deal broader.

@SutMobLib showing as a geotweet in TweetDeck

For some, that will mean discovering, spontaneously and without specifically searching for it, that a friend — or the mobile library — is around the corner and might be pleased to see us. The world around us is constantly shifting, with opportunities and hazards popping up and then disappearing again, often without leaving a trace. Now we can see those traces. Serendipity is the spice of life and it’s just got a very big helping hand. Fire up your radar.

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Further reading on where ambient intelligence is taking us:

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability
Malcolm McCullough, Digital Ground
Adam Greenfield, Everyware