the onda

This is a hilarious story about a guy who got his iPhone stolen and used Apple's new "Find my iPhone" feature to recover it directly from the thief— Jack Bauer style.

Outside of the persistent connection between the phone and the Apple service (is it via XMPP?), this new location broadcast stuff is the most exciting part of OS 3.0 for me. Because while location awareness has been a part of all of the future vision stuff that Nokia and mobile social network sites have shown for years, with "Find my iPhone" we now have a big vendor pushing it as a platform-level feature, and more specifically, one which is likely to start advertising it to the masses in their usual effective manner.

I suspect that the democratization of this technology is going to have broad ranging implications on privacy, terms-of-service, and just about every part of the "personal" in personal computing in the years to come. And as usual, we'll discover we didn't think enough about the implications of being locatable anywhere at any time via a web service before the feature became as prevalent as say, SMS or voicemail.