If you haven't seen it already, Domino's Pizza has a pizza tracker.  Yeah, I rolled my eyes at first, too.  But it's really sort of neat.  I know it's a bit of a gimmick, but it worked.  My daughter and I love to watch the pizza get prepped, put into the oven, boxed, and out for delivery.  It's a new age when you can follow your pizza from oven to your door.  You don't even get that sort of service in the restaurant.  But does this change the world?  Why yes, yes it does.

How, do you ask?  Well the most obvious is the one up on the competition ladder that this gives Domino's over Pizza Hut (Pasta Hut?), Little Caesars, and the like.  It even gives other food delivery services something to think about.  The Internet is no longer simply a place to show your menu.  Or even to take an online order.  Now it provides useful feedback to your customers.

But this is just changing a market, that's not world changing, is it?

Not by itself, no.  But this also spreads beyond the food service boundaries.  If Domino's can track a pizza to your door within 30 minutes, FedEx better start showing me the same.  I've never worked for a package delivery company, but presumably they operate within a delivery queue.  FedEx and UPS already know, rather instantaneously, when a package has been delivered.  Shortly, I believe, we will start to see that queue.  Certainly not the actual GPS location of the truck, as that may very well skirt the boundaries of privacy (ha ha ha.  hooo.  Sorry, amused myself with the thought of anyone giving a damn about my privacy).  Ok, yes, shortly we will see that "you are #19 in our delivery queue."  And we'll see it update as each package is signed off on its way to you.  And I know each of you would really value that information.  How many times have you thought, "I really would like to go to the grocery story.  It'll only take me 15 minutes.  But I know once I leave the shipment will arrive."  Now if you could see you're #30 in the list, you'd certainly be more inclined to take that chance than if you were #5.

But wait, there's more.  Once we have tracking down to this queue level, enter in notifications.  Certainly one of the sites will enable that.  Wouldn't you like to receive a text message once your package is within X number of stops?  But I don't see that this needs to be handled by the delivery companies themselves.  What we have now is a completely new delivery company opportunity.  One of information delivery.  It starts with a system that is able to track packages and queues for you, and send you notices via your phone, IM, email, etc.  Twitter already has that foundation in place.  Some smart group may take advantage of their service.  A smarter one would build their own, but you have to start somewhere.

Now that we've got this new delivery company, what else can it do?  WiiAlerts.com is already partially there.  Our new company will begin to monitor other things that we care about.  Not just finding when a Wii is available, even thought that is knowledge we all need, but how about other items we're interested in?  When does Dell kick off their big 50% off sale?  When are tickets to that next Rick Astley concert available (cause we know they're all going to be sold out)?  Why is there a movie about talking chihuahua's coming soon?

I don't think it will stop there.  Ever want to know when Pepsi's go on sale at your local grocery store?  Do you still receive the Sunday paper to see?  This isn't an instantaneous information need, but it can still be tracked by our information delivery service.  If a store is spending money on paper media, how about sharing their inventory and prices?  Grocery stores begin to open their database to the world.  This will be tough on competition, but all of a sudden you can monitor who's got what for the best price.  You can plug in your grocery list and have the system tell you which store to go to, not just for individual items, but who has your overall lowest total cost?  (If you care enough, you could get the cheapest price by going to various stores, but I'd think it'd be worth my time to visit the one where my overall total was less).

So now we're tracking pizza, packages down to the delivery queue, we're monitoring the availability and pricing of entertainment and necessities.  How about your RSS feed?  That's already being done, so it should certainly be included, right?  Virtual worlds and online games will start to offer information outside of their little environment (SL does already), but now you can get a notice when your friends are online.  Stock prices?  Sure.  How about a notice whenever a charge hits your credit card, and how much that charge was for?  Talk about fraud prevention.  How about knowing what your local politician is up to?  Want to receive a notice as to how your local Senator voted?  You care enough to receive football scores, why not that?

And all of this because Domino's decided to let us track a pizza.  Do we forgive them for the Noid yet?  Yeah, me neither.