Damn, they’re getting closer to stealing my idea. “They” is anyone else that knows how to program something. Here’s my idea…
You know those self-guided tours—like Alcatraz—where you carry around a little electroic doohicky, walk around, and it tells you about whatever you’re standing in front of?
If you replace the doohicky with a phone, you could listen to stories anywhere. Now that phones either have GPS or can geolocate (triangulation), knowing where you are is no problem. The “tours” could be produced by anyone. Anyone could upload a story or series of stories online, or by calling in to their account. If you call from the location you’re talking about, it could automatically mark the location, since your phone knows where you are.
“This pizza place is awesome after the bars. I’m wasted. By the way if you need to pee…I found this great secluded alley, behind the yellow trash can you can see from the corner.” The stories could be a little more compelling than that, obviously. It could even be categorized for more touristy stuff vs. every day stuff, by organization, or by topic… You could filter only points of interest left by some historical society, for example.
If you want to go on a walk about through the city, you could open the app on your phone and whenever you’re close to someone’s story/point of interest it would start playing their recording automatically.
So anyway, I just saw this thing called Geograffiti today that does something similar to my idea…or at least half of it. And I thought of this like 2 years ago. Seriously, I need to learn how to program, or find people that’ll work for me for free.