By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

Those folks at Google get a lot right. The best, newest addition is Streetview at Google Maps, made available last week as a type of enhancement to the maps views of San Francisco, New York and Miami. Click over to maps.google.com, type "San Francisco, CA" and click on "Street View" to try it out. Then come back and read about the coming of PLACE.

PLACE. Why the caps? Because we need a term that takes us outside our daily experience of places on the street and yet means more to us than the virtual pages and places of the Web. We need a term to capture the collection of new technologies centered around mobile computing, GPS, maps data and RFID. And we need a way of talking about what these new technologies will mean when we mash them up with our own opinions, reviews and stories. When we put mobile computing in a world that knows where we are (GPS) and will soon know where our things are (RFID), we get something much more powerful than any of these things in isolation -- we get PLACE.

The first and best picture of PLACE is still Peter Morville's Ambient Findability (2005) from O'Reilly. Check it out to for an especially convincing argument on the important of RFID and why it will make a difference when things aren't IDed barcode-style as a class but trackable as individual items visible to us the world over.

Then add maps data to Morville -- we're not far from the time when the individual planes, tranes and cars that make up our transportation infrastructure will track all the time on maps available to us all. For that matter, we're not far from the time when any object anywhere tracks for the benefit of someone. The media pick privacy concerns as a way to hammer the import of this part of PLACE. But the media miss what's really important -- our coming interaction with PLACE.

What will it mean to hold up the viewfinder of the camera in our cellphones on the streets of New York and see a virtual overlay -- of addresses, reviews, crime statistics and ads -- layered on top of the buildings on the corner? Nokia demoed the technology at O'Reilly's ETel in March and whether it works now or 18 months from now, the impact of this part of PLACE will be enormous.

And what will it mean to leave an airport, a restaurant or the home of a friend and tag our thoughts right then and there to the virtual representation of that very real place? It's not hard to imagine a developing layer of rants, raves, warnings and opinions hovering over every building everywhere, all available as we look through Google and Nokia's eyes: like an ever-present layer of virtual, floating graffiti.

It's not just pages and blogs and bits of news that deserve to get tagged and rated and reviewed in the 2.0 world. It's physical places and the experiences we have there, too. And with the coming of PLACE, we will publish the experiences we have in real places and see the experiences of others in those very same places, all reflected to us from far away at our desks or immediately in front of us on the street. All this through the coming of a virtual PLACE that's about to get a lot more real.

By Trevor Baca, VP Software Engineering.

During my upcoming presentation at ETel, Voice and the Web: The New Terrain, I’ll be examining how the global telephone network evolved from a completely closed system to where we’re headed when the global telephone network finally becomes available to applications developers everywhere.

In the course of putting together the presentation I asked myself why much of the 2.0 hoopla isn't about voice.

We're telecom innovators. We think about people and communications and technology a lot. And we look at myspace and can't help but wonder how all that happened without us. Why?

Put another way, just how did social computing get so social, all without voice?

First, let's check the observation. Perhaps tens of millions of messages pass through myspace daily. Those messages are text, or images, or both. But not voice. And yet voice seems so obvious. Friend online? Click here to ring both your phones. But no. On flickr we find photos from everywhere in world. And looking at everybody's stuff even turns out to be fun and engaging. And we can see exactly who took what, and why. Click here to ring the photographer's phone? Again, no. No voice. And craigslist? Do people call each other when they use humanity's largest watercooler to sell a sofa? In fact, they frequently do. This one's interesting. Clicking through the wants-ads and personals turns up a surprising number of phone numbers, frequently lightly scrambled -- "4* 15 # three two six 1805 for more info" -- to throw off the spammers. More phone numbers, in fact, than we might expect. So craiglist allows for the power of voice but, crucially, doesn't do anything to actively promote voice between users. Why not? The technology exists today to pass out 1-day, 3-day or 7-day disposable telephone numbers to anybody buying that sofa or looking for a date. And away would go the spambots, forever. But no. No voice.

Why? Doesn't the social web realize that people talk?

eBay is our current best counterexample to the voiceless web. eBay believes in the power of voice. So much so, in fact, that they bought Skype. For billions.

So, on the one hand we have mypace and craigslist -- currently the first and seventh largest websites on the planet -- whose planners and designers either don't know they can bring voice to their users, or don't care. And, on the other hand, we have eBay -- probably the world's largest online buyers' community -- spending billions to bring Skype to users that could have been Skyping all along, if only they had cared. Both parts of this equation are bizarre. A complete lack of interest in voice on one side together with an obvious overresponse on the other.

Stay tuned for the conclusion to this post. And catch Trevor Baca’s talk at ETel on Wednesday, February 28, at 4:15pm - 4:30pm, in Salon ABCDE.