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Facebook Places opens it's API

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If You Learn to Spin Straw Into Gold, You'd Better Appreciate Gold

Imagine I offered you a small glowing box. You could put it in your pocket, and when you pulled it out, it would tell you almost anything, about anything in the world, almost immediately. You could use it to hear voices, read words and see pictures from anywhere. You could use it to broadcast words and pictures from your life out to anyone on earth.

The box would know who you are and it would know exactly where you are at any given moment. It could tailor what it told you for your particular circumstances. That place you're standing in right now? The box could zoom in to tell you everything that ever happened in that place, or zoom out and paint an illuminated picture of exactly where you stand in the world, of what was, is and will happen around you in the future. It could tell you things you liked or it could tell you things you didn't like, if you wanted it to.

This would be a bargain, of course, and that means that some other things would happen, too. Deep in the history of every glowing box would be a small, hazy picture of people doing things to each other that ought never, ever be done. They are horrible things, but they are being done to people very far away. ("In Congo, I've seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents' flesh...") And those people have already had so many bad things happen to them before.

The glowing boxes would be truly incredible - they would have the potential to accelerate humanity's access to knowledge and communication faster than thousands of years of history had accelerated our connection to the world before.

You could use your glowing box for magic.

But once the boxes arrived, most people would agree: most people wouldn't really want to use them for much beyond the simple things in life. Clipping mobile coupons. Playing mobile Farmville.

But aren't they marvelous, magical, glowing boxes?

Thankfully there are things being done with these boxes that go far beyond the mundane, things that aspire to fulfill their promise and at least in part acknowledge their costs. But when we say that most people will never appreciate things like location apps until they can get $1 off a cup of coffee - there's something deeply tragic about that.