“
The truth is, most of the alerts that Field Trip sent me weren’t right for the moment. I’d get a Thrillist story that felt way too boostery outside its email-list context. Or I’d get a historical marker from an Arcadia Publishing book that would have been interesting, but wasn’t designed to be consumed on my phone. They often felt stilted, or not nearly as interesting as you’d expect (especially for a history nerd like me). You can handtune the sorts of publications that you receive, but of the updates I got, only Atlas Obscura (and Curbed and Eater to a lesser extent) seemed designed for this kind of consumption. No one else seemed to want to explain what might be interesting about a given block to someone walking through it; that’s just not anyone’s business. And yet stuff that you read on a computer screen at home has got to be different from stuff that you read in situ.”
— The World Is Not Enough: Google and the Future of Augmented Reality - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic (via iamdanw)
This is why open spatial-annotation apps were banned as projects for my classes when I taught at ITP. For the record, it’s also why Foursquare works (deep constraints) and why no one talks about Second Life.
Reblogged from Dan W, Software Developer
