Post-Its for Passers-By
By RICHARD MORGAN
Published: November 13, 2005
During the Republican National Convention last year, Robert Pietri, a
37-year-old filmmaker from Park Slope, was arrested on 16th Street
between Irving Place and Park Avenue South. You'd know that if you
went to that block - well, if you went to that location, and if you
had a Motorola i860 cellphone, and if that phone were connected to a
program called Socialight.
Socialight leaves virtual Post-it notes, called sticky shadows, in
specific sites around the city. A text message pops up when a
cellphone is carried into the designated space, which is generally
smaller than a city block but larger than an intersection. Started
last month in a Chelsea loft by two 2004 graduates of New York
University, Socialight now has dotted the metropolitan region with
more than 500 stickies.
The topic of Mr. Pietri's first post to Socialight was his arrest,
but he quickly moved into less personal material: the spot where
Malcolm X was killed (the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights at
Broadway and 165th Street), for example, or the site of the Triangle
Shirtwaist fire (at Washington Place and Greene Street, in Greenwich
Village). "I didn't want to just say, 'There's a good mojito here' or
'There's good pizza here,' " Mr. Pietri said.
The entrepreneurs behind the program, Michael Sharon and Dan
Melinger, who helped develop Socialight at N.Y.U., have a history as
gamesters who use cities as playing boards; in another N.Y.U. game,
called Pac-Manhattan, cellphone users turn the streets of the borough
into the game itself. But with Socialight they wanted something
lighter and more social.
"With instant messaging on computers, you just ping people," Mr.
Sharon said. "It's short conversations, light-touch communication. So
we wanted to keep that fun with cellphones, which people carry
everywhere they go."
So far, Socialight functions only with the Motorola i860 because that
phone's built-in global positioning system chip and camera provided
the most fertile ground for the program's growth. But Mr. Melinger
notes that federal regulations are mandating the increased use of
G.P.S. chips in cellphones for emergency-response services, and he
and Mr. Sharon hope to spread Socialight along with that technology.
Until then, Mr. Pietri looms large among the shadows, one of which
notes that the Great Lawn in Central Park was a shantytown during the
Depression. "So that when somebody with a Frisbee finds out, they're
like, thank God," he said. "It gives them something to think about,
whether they choose to think about it or not."
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