Sooner this morning, I released an article on the Click2Map’s blog, Maps Bring People Closer. The idea conveyed in the article was that location-awareness services are not just a way to make new geo-based connections, but they’re also a priceless tool to enhance your existing relationships.
Here is an example: My wife lives on the other side of the globe, and we also have an 18-month-young son. For practical reasons, my son is now staying with me in San Francisco where he was born. There is no need to say how tormenting it is for the mom to have her little boy live 5576.4 miles away from her. Thanks to new Web technologies, it is becoming easier to be constantly connected to one another, share our daily activities, and therefore feel closer to one another.
The location-awareness tool MyTracks dramatically helps us enhance this long-distance connection. Tonight, I took my boy on a walk around my neighborhood. I turned on the MyTracks app on my phone, and slowly headed to the Safeway to purchase diapers. When I got home, I stopped MyTracks and sent the itinerary to my wife by email, with a little message attached saying: ‘hey Mommy, I went for a walk with Daddy, here are all the places I saw today!’ With the Streetview feature, my wife can literally replicate our walk around the neighborhood. Now isn’t that the most value you can get out of location-awareness services?
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(Sorry, Blogger bug, the map above shows ads !!!?? Blogger team?)
I believe that, by experiencing an extended long-distance relationship, I am experimenting some new Web tools in a very out-of-the-box way. Seriously, I wonder if the developers of MyTracks ever thought that their tools would help bring a mom closer to her baby…
Anyhow, this is not the only way I am using Web tools to compensate a long-distance relationship. If I feel this is appropriate, I will share some more ideas on how Web 2.0 technologies can make a long-distance relationship easier to handle. If you have found yourself in the same situation, and have some original tips to share, you can imagine I am all ears 🙂