So yesterday I posted how I felt the tipping point with geoTagging might come with the new version of the iPhone well like clock work AppleInsider confirms today that it will indeed have it. AWESOME! With the fact that they are going to be rolling this phone out to 40 something countries this time and it has GPS & 3G…. this thing is going to rock.

You can read about it all at AppleInsider

First the definition: Geotagging, sometimes referred to as Geocoding, is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as websites, RSS feeds, or images and is a form of geospatial metadata.

Basically it is adding Latitude and Longitude to an object, so if you search for information based on a location you can find relevant objects.

I have to say I love this type of stuff, for my senior project at The U myself and two classmates wrote a script that pulled your current position from a GPS receiver and sent it through a cell phone to a database. Then through a flash app we displayed your current position on a map with your heading and speed. I actually still have it online, projectgps.com click GIS, now be easy on me this is back in 2003.

Fast forward to today and Google is slowly but surely making my vision come true. One of the cooler things we did back then is we had a database of locations and their geotag, as we tested it we could see the distance from a location our friend was. Today I notice that google is pulling Geotagged photos based on areas that I’m looking at on a map.

My wife and I were thinking of taking a road trip for our day off on Monday. While I was looking up locations I opened up Google Maps and went to a lake with in driving distance. There was a new button I had not noticed before called “More”, under that is a check box for photos, when I clicked that BOOM a ton of photos from the exact location they were taken. I could now see exactly what real people see at different locations, not a brochure but the actual photos.

So as I was looking at this I was wondering how Flickr’s own geo tagging was going. Flickr was one of the first large website to incorporate geo tagging but since I don’t use Flickr for mapping it is not something i had checked out in a while. I have to say the quality of photos on Flickr are a lot better than the ones google is pulling in.

It is really cool to see the highquality professional photos for different locations from different photographers.However, major Fail on Yahoo for not having Flickr photos showing up on Yahoo Maps. They own Flickr, they should have it done already.

Now I really think the tipping point is going to come soon and I think that will be iPhone 2.0, the jesus phone. I’m really looking forward to the new version of the jesus phone because it should have a pretty good camera and there is rumored gps functionality. That combined with the SDK, I think there are going to be some really great geo tag applications. I would love to see an app that takes your position relative to a location and shows you information, whether it is coupons or events but I see a ton of possibilities to having your live position and an internet connection.

Trying to define Web 2.0 is all the rage these days, some people say it is social networking others say it is about interactivity (AJAX). At the end of the day all the definitions are right because the whole point of a new version is the fact that it is new, so defining it as stuff we didn’t do in the 1.0 days is good enough for me. With that being said there are a couple things I’m excited about and they all tend to center around data aggregation. Now aggregation in general can apply to a lot of different things happening on the web, RSS for example is a simple way to help you aggregate your favorite authors or news sources.

Google and Microsoft for example are now aggregating traffic information, they are both using the information in similar ways but with just slightly different twists.

In Google’s case they take the traffic information and let you see what traffic is like on certain days.

Tomorrow I have to head to the airport around 2 o’clock, with this new functionality I can see what the traffic might be like around that time. Now they can’t predict accidents but I like the fact that if I’m in an unfamiliar city with a meeting the next day, I will be able to determine loosely what the traffic might be like.

I say that is pretty cool and some functionality that I’m sure a lot of people that travel will find useful.

Now Microsoft has taken this information and put a slight twist on it. What they do is when you ask for driving directions you can choose for them to factor in live traffic information. So if you are running out the door and are printing out directions it might be able to save you a big headache if it helps you avoid an accident. Now on the flip side of that is the fact that the piece of paper you print out is not magically going to update when you are on the road so if you print out the data the night before and are factoring in live traffic it isn’t going to help you the next day.

Obviously nothing substitutes having gps in the car with a live traffic feed but for you all out there not lucky enough to have that or are not psychic maybe a mix of what Google and Microsoft are doing will help you out. I’m sure ultimately they will start blending functionality so what Google has Microsoft will and vice versa.

Another great example of aggregation is a site called farecast.com, I have been using them for a couple years and it is a great free service. So good that Microsoft bought them a few weeks ago. Here is the cool part about farecast, it will tell you if you are getting a good deal or not. Now you can surf around the net and look for the best deal, you can even use a service like kayak that aggregates a whole bunch of sites together but farecast has a twist. Farecast will study historical trends for the route you are flying and will predict with sometimes fairly hight accuracy if you should wait to buy your ticket or if you should get it right away because the fare is only going to go higher.

For example I flew to Seattle this past March and I knew about the trip a couple month ahead of time, I was able to save a bunch on the ticket because farecast told me to wait. It felt based on the trends that the price will start to decline now I followed the advice and sure enough it went down almost a hundred dollars a fee weeks before the trip.

All of these are great examples of the impact websites can have on our day to day life by helping aggregate and mine all the data that is out there.