Location awareness has been available in GPS gadgetry for some time, but now it is moving into devices like the iPhone and Instinct and that is going to open up a new relationship between people and places.    There are obviously some potential ominous aspects of this but I am confident that we’ll find location awareness will bring a lot more good than bad.    Some of the neat stuff will be the ability to track friends and associates.    For example at a large conference it is often difficult to find all the people you need to talk to even after emails and calls – a system that breaks down when everybody is overwhelmed and there is a flurry of intense activity in a short time span.

More interesting to everybody will be the ability to automatically tag photos and videos with their location.  Flickr already lets you enter the location of a photo but it’s too time consuming for most.   We’ll start to see millions and soon billions of photos tagged with location, and mapping the world photo by photo will soon be a reality.    Imagine an online map that contains a montage of pictures such that you can click on any point on the map and pull up thousands of images from that location.

O’Reilly Reportst on the iPhone’s location applications