Some of the earliest posts on this blog were about how powerful location aware services could be.  I spoke about Mobile Mashups and SOA, as well as Location Based Services (LBS) and AGPS and finally the value of Location (and how I thought it was relevant, but not quite sure what to do with it).  You’ll notice this is “so long ago” in Internet History (last year) that I refer to Touchstone, now called Particls.

So it’s with great interest that I can see some of the things I was blogging and thinking about beginning to become a reality.  I was a user of Plazes for a while, but ultimately gave it up because to some extent I just didn’t get it and I think having seen BrightKite now, it was missing the fine-grained access I needed to feel comfortable at that time (it may have it now I haven’t re-checked).

BrightKite is a very compelling and interesting service, provides reasonable privacy settings, but also links in to Twitter by default to set either your location or tweet it.  I’m going to see how it evolves, but I can see BrightKite becoming part of my tweeting in the future (especially when I get a new phone in the next couple of months).  It will potentially be my photo-log of where and what I’m doing, auto-feeding this in to Twitter as appropriate, while I’ll use Twitter directly through it’s various other clients for my 140 character tweets on the world and the community.

Another interesting feature of BrightKite is FireEagle. FireEagle sounds like it’s the DataPortability answer to Location Based Services, an open exchange for location information and the fact that a player like Yahoo is making a move in this space suggests we are at the cusp of big things to come.

Dopplr also adds to the picture of location based services, although in this case Dopplr fulfills a “Where am I going” rather than a “Where am I” feature.

I speculated early on, that LBS would potentially be of use for the Enterprise, but I couldn’t quite touch on the use.  The big area I could see is staying in touch with the people who are part of your Enterprise as they move around, with BrightKite and it’s GEORSS feeds, Dopplr and it’s “where am I going to be” and services like FireEagle, I can see that in the next 6 - 12 months, this will start to become a reality.

To paraphrase myself from over twelve months ago:

As Architects, understanding how location works and what location information is needed to tie the system together will be critical steps that can be taken now to ensure early mover advantage when it finally becomes a reality.

You’ll see a few changes across the board in the next week or two as I gradually re-factor my digital life.  What’s this mean?  Well I have 4 blogs, 4 active e-mail addresses (other inactive ones), three web hosts (only one I remember the password to and it’s broken), 1 old http site archived on disk, more social network accounts than I can track, e-mail spam from sites I don’t read, feeds from sites I do and generally a fractured on-line identity that has evolved as the internet has evolved.

I’m going to be actively stream-lining all this activity to centralise it into services that I do use, where you can come to get the latest.  I’m going to actively shut-down accounts I don’t use (Jaiku) and make more prominent services I am using (Twitter and LinkedIn).

I’ve already created an OpenID account (yes, I’m slow) and I’m setting BinaryPlex as a delegator of my OpenID to http://claimid.com.  In light of this I’m going to actively re-consider my use of sites like http://del.icio.us (which doesn’t support OpenID) and consider http://ma.gnolia.com instead which does.

The end aim will be a new, streamlined, re-factored Internet me, that is updated to take advantage of the latest trends.  I think it’s an essential piece of housekeeping that everyone should do!

To that end, I’ve reluctantly retired the old green BinaryPlex format for a much more up to date, 2-column, widget and WordPress 2.5.x compatible theme.  I hope it grows on me, I have been very attached to the greenery one :-).  The 2-columns will become more important as I intend to feed more meta information into this site than I have in the past.

As I conduct each step, I’ll blog about why I’ve made the moves I have and what I see the advantages are. Maybe some of you will join me on this adventure and I hope to take small steps towards catching up with those others of you who have passed me by while my digital identity has been standing still over the last 12 - 18 months.