Social networks are beginning to take on more and more collaborative methods, and another example of that is the Waze application available for iPhones. This is basically traffic outsourcing, done for free, although it does drain your battery, by all of those using the application. It allows you, amongst other things, to indicate the presence of police. For example, with absolute pinpoint accuracy, it indicated the presence of a police officer hidden behind a tree, trapping on William Nicol the other day and while there are those that have gripes about that, there certainly cannot be gripes about people, for example posting information about accident scenes, routes to avoid and being able, before commencing your journey each day, to get an accurate report on any possible problems along the road and robots out of order.

The application also allows people to interact with the application by voice control – so you can report traffic and alert others to road hazards just by speaking to your phone. Obviously, it is early days for the application in South Africa, and while it is very popular in Israel, and it will get more powerful in South Africa the more that people are using it. It is also an example of what is to follow – one can for example easily imagine an application showing everybody where all their friends are partying at night, or even for sports events, an application to be able to locate where all your other friends are seated in the same arena and when people get to even start complaining about the same thing, the impact on business or government is also going to be even greater than it is now.