All of those try to know - to various degrees of success - the location of the current user based on rather large databases that map IPs to locations. Those locations are either actual town-level locations or just return the country/country code.
]]>The whole thing is called Geode and will be included in future Firefox betas or can be installed into older Firefoxes directly from here. There is a blog entry and, of course, a TechCrunch article. Pownce and Fire Eagle have already integrated the specification into their services - and first tries show that it works amazingly accurate.
]]>Unfortunately, there's not much you can do with the G.P.S. According to Apple, the iPhone's G.P.S. antenna is much too small to emulate the turn-by-turn navigation of a G.P.S. unit for a vehicle, for example.
- For iPhone, the 'New' Is Relative
That in itself makes the GPS a fun addition but nothing new for areas that were already covered by the XPS data before.
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This rugged, all-weather collar has an integrated GPS transmitter and antenna that work with the Astro® 220 to ensure that your dog will never be lost again. Plus, it's specially weighted so the antenna will always point to the sky for optimal signal.
Will be pretty useless for Joe Dog-owner, but it might be fun. [via]
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Care like taking a trip from San Diego to Sydney? Don't forget to bring your Kayak. [via]
]]>Most people like to know a bit about their future travel destination, get some insider tips from travelers who have been there before and are looking for general advice about the area. Reading travel blogs or travel communities can provide an often subjective, but yet informative and interesting view on events, places and sights.
And especially the back-packing kind of traveler is very open to meet and stay in contact with other travelers world-wide - and while Social Networks like Facebook or Friendster can offer a certain way to stay in contact, community websites especially aimed at this crowd are often better at catering for their specific needs.
Last but not least those poor people who stay at home are often interested in the whereabouts and adventures of those who manage to see new places - and the blogging and picture sharing functions of travel communities offer a way to keep them informed without having to use long CC: lists by email.
]]> A lot of pages are crowding this space and just while surfing half-idly I managed to pick five interesting contenders in this space:
VirtualTourist.com is the grand-daddy of travel communities. Around since last millennium the site managed to gather reviews, travel tips and further information for almost every possible tourist spot on this planet - they estimate roughly a million members and almost two million travel trips. While this might sound like only two tips per person, they might be counting a lot of dead accounts.
TripTracker.net seems to be quite a new kid on the scene with a focus mostly on travel (geo) blogging and photo sharing. The site allows for the upload of GPS data and attempts to match the geo data with the photo data. While there might be some travel tips hidden within the travel journals, the main focus is clearly a travel blog/photoblog in this very beautiful service.
The Trip Planner from Yahoo! Travel is a bit sad. In every corner there are little moments of greatness, but all in all it looks like a bland corporate (and older) version of TripTracker.com. Given how much I like the other location services by Yahoo I really wanted to like this. But their lackluster integration of other Yahoo services leaves a lot to be desired - especially the fact that their Flickr integration is so halfhearted and doesn't use the location data and the timestamps of the photos shows that this product doesn't seem to get much love. On the upper hand - it is easy to use and navigate and I'd recommend it to non-geeky, mainstream kind of users.
TripSay claims to be the holy grail of travel communities - I couldn't find much more than a few screenshots and a description on Web Worker Daily, though.
The last but certainly not least mention goes to Dopplr which is aiming more at the business travel / conference crowd and is very well integrated with tools like Flickr and Upcoming. Their focus is mostly on getting people to re-connect on business trips and they also offer some travel tip functionality. Given their integration with web services and the clear, beautiful interaction design, it is not a surprise that Dopplr soon became the deserved favorite of the web crowd.
Basically all those web pages have their merits and their target group - Dopplr is great for their business trip / conference folks, TripTracker is a good place to keep a travel (photo) blog, VirtualTourist looks like a perfect place for backpackers and the Trip Planner is for the less web-savvy mainstream folks.
]]>Of course they hope those services will be amazing.
Being in a rather early state and with access for only a few thousand developers worldwide, Fire Eagle is still a relatively unknown service and is not actually used by any other Yahoo property yet. Only the even more obscure Zone Tag from the Yahoo research division at Berkeley has a (one-way) interface to Fire Eagle so far. Services like Upcoming, Flickr and Yahoo Local are yet to be connected.
Yahoo Local did just place me in Bonn, but probably it's using the My Yahoo settings.
Outside services like Plazes, Dopplr and Brightkite can connect to Fire Eagle already - but just one-way.
]]> They all feed their information to Fire Eagle, which is a good thing - but they don't use the data from Fire Eagle, even if they're allowed to do so. And in the case of Dopplr they actually do take the information from Fire Eagle, show it somewhere well hidden, but don't set the user's location based on this information. From a user's perspective that's a hint of FAIL.Brightkite's Brady sees a scalability issue:
We don't currently support pulling from FE because there is no scalable way to consume FE information...we'd have to poll the FE status for every FE user every few minutes...that's fine for a few people, but not for thousands of users.
and Felix from Plazes "puts the blame" both on what they think that users want:
actually most people want plazes to set your location, because they are using the plazer as a convenient updater. also with the iphone plazer coming up it will make setting your location to a plaze really easy. and more or less as a byproduct set your location on fireeagle as well.
and on the missing granularity of the Fire Eagle data:
obviously it would be nice if fireeagle can set your location on plazes and we are currently trying to figure that one out. the problem is that if you are at "300rd street" according to fireeagle, which plaze are you at? "wired" or "yahoo brickhouse"?
Both also say they're in talks with the Fire Eagle folks to resolve those issues - so there is some hope that those issues are solved until Fire Eagle goes out of the closed beta and my contacts at Brightkite can - for a lack of a better word - enjoy my location updates from Plazes.
]]>A rather geeky (and therefore fun) way to get location data via GPS and a cellphone is the open source software Mobile Trail Explorer by Finnish software developer Tommi Laukkanen. It is mainly written with biking or hiking in mind but has all the ingredients for a useful software for location based software, too. The geo placement and recording is spot on and very stable - at least on my test system, a Nokia N73 and a Blumax GPS-009 - and the web recording function is the part that makes the software really interesting to me. A simple REST interface enables the upload of the current data point to the web. All it takes now is a small script to send this data to a location broker like Fire Eagle and the data is universally usable through a well-documented OAuth-API.
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