For most, July 4 is a celebration spent near home and outdoors with family & friends, with food & drinks, and lazy sunset lounging followed by a finale that ends with a bang. The event happens in neighborhoods all across the US, and for a brief moment in time, neighbors connect through a common local experience. I wasn't tweeting last July 4, but if I was, I may have read random micro-messages and seen photos throughout the day about what kind of meat was on the grill, the types of beer consumed, a note about who got hit with a water-balloon, and other uninteresting neuron firings. But after all that self-absorbed yet necessary-to-learn-from noisiness passed and the fireworks began, I suspect I would then discover non-noisy valuable intimacy from local neighbors posting notes and media about where they were and what they were experiencing. So what the hell does this have to do with location-enriched mobility?

A July 4 content stream no doubt has useless characteristics, but useful connection explosions occur when locality and sociality converge and common contributions leveraging the two create a new real-time local content-stream king. Mobile services enabling this flavor of local contribution connect participant-observers to events in time and place, creating not only a useful local kinship for trusted sharing, but also invaluable local content sources for outsiders to learn from.