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.