Geode Tells Firefox Where You Are, What’s Nearby
As we mentioned this morning, Mozilla has officially launched Geode, an experimental version of the location-aware tools that will become part of future Firefox releases. Geode and future versions of Firefox will support the new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the ability for websites to request, and you to optionally grant access to, your current location.
At the moment, Geode gets your location by using Skyhook’s Loki technology to map the WiFi signals in your area to your location. Once Geode is installed, any site requesting location info will trigger a small toolbar that allows you to choose varying levels of detail that you want the site to access.
At the moment the main proof-of-concept is the Food Finder demo. To use it just install Geode and head to the site, once you grant it access to your location, Food Finder will plot a list of nearby restaurants.
Here’s how the Labs blog describes the Food Finder use case:
You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.
Beyond Food Finder, Geode’s usefulness gets a bit murkier. Both Pownce and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle service have also implemented code that takes advantage of Geode — in the case of Fire Eagle it means that you’ll no longer need to manually update your location — but much of the future direction of Geode is still up in the air.
For now Mozilla wants to see how developers use Geode and what sort of exciting new applications (if any) might come from it. In the future Mozilla plans to expand Geode and offer similar features within Firefox:
Geode and the Geolocation Services in Firefox 3.1 will use the same W3C API for Geolocation, meaning that the same JavaScript code will work in both. The still-in-development Firefox 3.1 version will allow the user to choose a geolocation service provider, which can either be a peripheral device like a GPS, or a web-based service provider like we’ve used in Geode.
Geode certainly has promise and if Mozilla can work the features into its coming mobile browser then we have no doubt it will be successful.
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