Location aware
Posted in Tech/Development on: Monday, May 19, 2008 by Paul Boag
The web is full of exciting innovations at the moment. However, it is geocoding that personally excites me the most. In this post I explain what it is and why I believe it offers so much potential.
I am definitely not an expert on geocoding but I have been aware of the idea for a long time. I first encountered the concept back in the late 90s. At the time it entirely passed me by and I couldn’t see why the person explaining it was so excited.
“Just imagine the possibilities if every file had a location stamp like it has a date stamp”
I obviously lacked imagination. It all felt too theoretical. Too far off.
Later the concept was reintroduced to me, but this time all I saw was a world of adverts being pushed to my mobile phone as I walk by the local starbuck. Who wanted that?
The lightbulb finally switched on when I heard Tom Coates speaking at d.construct last year (Download Tom’s talk: MP3). He talked about a project he was working on called Fire Eagle that allowed applications to pass your geo location back and forth.
Geocoding is a reality now
Nine months on and I have finally got to play with Fire Eagle. I no longer need imagination to see the potential, it is no longer far off. Geocoding is here and boy am I excited.
For me the real power of geocoding comes because of mobile devices. Once your mobile knows where you are the possibilities are endless. My iphone for example lacks GPS but it can work out my position based on cell towers and wifi networks. This enables me to do lots of things…
- I can attach my location to twitter posts and see other twitters nearby. (via Twinkle)
- I can upload photos with location information and see other photos taken from my current location. (via iFlickr)
- I can view wikipedia entries of nearby locations.
- I can broadcast my current location to my blog.
- I can see which of my friends are nearby (presuming they too broadcast their location). (via Navizon)
- I can find local restaurants, events and other points of interest.
All of that I setup for myself in a couple of hours. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what is to come.
The website owners perspective
This is not just something consumers should be getting excited about. It offers huge potential to website owners as well, because it provides users with new ways to access their information.
Consider for a moment what information you hold that is location specific. Do you have physical outlets (or other points of interest) that could be geocoded so users can easily find them? Maybe the content on your site relates to a geographical location (for example a university website). Or would users find it useful to know where you wrote a particular page of content (maybe a travel blog)?
I am the first to admit that geotagging is still in its infancy. However, there is no doubt it is on the cusp of going mainstream. Consumers have adopted car navigation systems very quickly and are familiar with adding points of interest (at least where speed cameras are concerned)! It will not be long before that experience makes the leap to mobiles.
It maybe premature to add location information to your data. but it is certainly the time to start thinking about what information you have that could be geotagged.
For more on geotagging and fire eagle listen to our upcoming interview with Tom Coates on show 118.
6 Comments
Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email
Sounds interesting, although I don’t think I’d use it from a consumer perspective myself. It all seems a bit too much of the intrusive Big Brother to me.
@Gary… I understand what you mean but they offer a huge level of control. For example I can chose to only show which county I am in or only provide my location to certain individuals or services. You only expose the information you want to.
Ah yes, this excites me as well, in fact it is the topic of a paper that I am currently writing for my english class. If anyone has anymore resources having to do with this topic that they would like to mention I would be very happy for the help. thanks!
I’m really excited about the whole idea of location. I signed up for Fire Eagle and Dopplr but until there is an easy way for me to update my location on the move it seems a bit pointless. I don’t have an IPhone and I don’t particularly want one (nor can I afford one). Is there not a way to get my location from my phone’s http headers (they contain my mobile number for example). Is there a way a web script can get my location info from my phone? If so I could write a script that would update my location straight away.
Seems to me that this has been in the works for a while… but you’re right Paul (as usual), Fire Eagle (and projects like it/based on it) really make geocoding an exciting prospect, now.
As for the worry about Big Brother… that’s why Fire Eagle talk so much about privacy settings etc (Tom talks about it here… http://www.viddler.com/explore/Premasagar/videos/2/)... sounds like Yahoo have made the user privacy settings granular enough that those of us who are paranoid can still remain hidden and anonymous (although i’m still waiting for a Fire agle invite to materialise in my inbox… so i can’t really comment in any depth ;) ).
@Paul: you mentioned that you use Twinkle on your iPhone… i installed it and played with it.. and i like it.. except for me, the home screen only shows me direct messages – not the tweets of all the people i’m following.. which makes it a bit annoying / useless… is that the same for you?
Thanks for drawing my attention to this in your podcast Paul.
This knowledge came of use yesterday when during a meeting my colleague wished that instead of having to know the appropriate mobile URLS for local info, her device would just tell her what was nearby – restaurants, atms, post offices etc.
I have now sent her this article link in the hopes they will also see that the concept is becoming a very mobile usable reality.