Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that one of the Location Based Services concepts I find both fascinating and indicative of the way of the future is what I’ve called Digital Graffiti*. In other words, you access digital information when moving about the physical world, with your mobile phone. The availability of this information can itself be physical (like a bar code or the Yellow Arrow project) or virtual - where your phone “sniffs out” the feed to the info (like Siemens’ Digital Graffiti).

I believe that the physical marking of the message is an interim technology, until the virtual takes over,as clearly we can’t put up swathes of Yellow Arrows or QR codes and the like, all over the place.

So I was pleased to read (in the New York Times) yesterday, that the first of the virtual systems, that I’m aware of, has been launched in New York - also home of Yellow Arrow and Grafedia.

SociaLight has been started by two entrepreneurs and graduates for New York University, Michael Sharon and Dan Melinger. NYU also gave us many other LBS experiments in this space (including some of the companies mentioned above and Dodgeball, acquired by Google earlier this year).

SociaLight simply allows people to leave virtual notes for others to collect when they’re passing by that location, which they call StickyShadows. StickyShadows can be programmed to be discoverable by anyone (with the right mobile phone and software), a group of individuals or a private message, for one person’s eyes only.

Right now, there’s no mention of a business model. Though there’s a hint that commercial use will be encouraged with “special tools” available for this part of the community. I take this to mean that at some point, it’ll be free for amateur/private users, with commercial users having to pay to leave their marketing messages - this is certainly how I’d play it. However, they’ll have to roll this aspect out with care, as if it quickly becomes merely a spamming channel (albeit permission-based), many users will switch off pretty quickly.

The only bad news about SociaLight is that it’s currently only available for one mobile phone handset - the Motorola i860, which is the only phone with the right combo of phone and GPS currently available. However, as Directive 911 finally gets deployed in the US, other models will follow.

Directive 911, assuming it doesn’t get fudged, will see the US leap ahead with these kind of applications, to enrich society as a whole. I look forward to watching developments with interest.

* Siemens called their project in the same area by the same name, practically simultaneously, so either it’s a damn good name or pretty bleeding obvious