Webmonkey » geolocation

Mozilla Hacks Blog Offers HTML5 Geolocation Primer

Scott Gilbertson — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 17:04:59 +0000

The Mozilla Hacks blog has posted a nice screencast overview of the HTML5 Geolocation API. The video is designed to help anyone competing in Mozilla’s September developer derby (which involves building something with the Geolocation API), but it also makes a great overview for anyone wanting to get started with Geolocation.

The HTML5 Geolocation API enables web developers to discover a user’s location via the browser (with the user’s permission of course). There’s no need to install any apps or do anything else at all, provided your user has a modern web browser. Despite pretty good browser support for the HTML5 Geolocation API, geolocation tools have become associated with native mobile apps, not web apps. Mozilla’s September developer derby is hoping to inspire web developers to change that.

For those that don’t have a browser capable of using the Geolocation API there are a number of JavaScript based polyfills developers can use to fill in the gaps in browser support. Check out the Mozilla Hacks blog for some links to the Geolocation polyfills, as well as the sample code shown in the movie below.

See Also:

‘Places’ Turns Facebook Into a Location Sharing Powerhouse

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:52:46 +0000

Facebook has jumped on the location check-in bandwagon with a new feature known as Places. Facebook Places has launched with four partners, all services that already offer check-in services — Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah.

If you use Foursquare, Brightkite or other location check-in services there isn’t much to see in Facebook Places. The only real difference is the scale that Facebook brings to the table.

Places is already available to most in the U.S. in their desktop browsers on Thursday. To use Places on your mobile, you’ll either need to download the new Facebook iPhone app (version 3.2, which is available now), or you can head to the Facebook mobile site with a web browser that supports the Geolocation API (basically anything but IE).

To read full coverage of the Places launch announcement on Wednesday night, read Ryan Singel’s report on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

While Facebook isn’t doing much with location that hasn’t already been done at least half a dozen other services, it does of course bring location sharing to Facebook’s massive user base of 500 million people around the world. Eventually, all of them will get access to Places once it rolls out in other countries. In the past that user base hasn’t been very welcoming of new features, especially features that involve privacy changes. While Places will be activated for all accounts, by default your location won’t be broadcast to everyone — just your friends.

To use the new feature, you can actively check in to a location, or you can let your friends check you in to a location without doing anything. While this may ruffle your feathers, if you don’t want people knowing where you are, it’s pretty simple to disable your friends’ ability to check you in, and to just ignore the check-in button.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Places has three goals: helping people share where they are, seeing which of your friends are close by, and seeing what other places of interest are near you.

For the first two there’s a feature called “People Here Now” which shows you who else is also at your current location. The what part of the equation is murkier, though each place has a map with pins denoting nearby friends and locations (business data is pulled from Localeze). Facebook’s Places also offers a feature that allows businesses to “claim” a place, which then turns it into a Facebook page.

As for Facebook’s current Places partners, two are broadcasting their data to Facebook and two pulling Places data into their own sites. Foursquare and Gowalla are both broadcasters — your check-ins on either site are passed on to Facebook (for now the API is one way, so if you check in through Facebook, your Foursquare account will not be updated) and your location is updated on both services.

In the case of Yelp, your check-ins are pulled out of Facebook Places and added to Yelp reviews. Booyah also pulls in Facebook location data as part of a new iPhone-based game, InCrowd (set to launch soon).

For developers there are some new API hooks to take advantage of the new Places feature, though for now the Places API is read-only. A Write and Search API is currently in a closed beta testing phase. Head over to the new Places API documentation to learn more.

See Also:

Facebook Finds its Place in the Location-Sharing Landscape

Michael Calore — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:33:14 +0000

The biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday.

Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends,” and a set of APIs other location-sharing services can employ to allow Facebookers to update their location info using outside services.

NYT‘s Nick Bilton says Facebook will shed light on the new service at the company’s upcoming f8 developer conference in April.

Facebook has certainly taken its sweet time getting in on the location-sharing game — services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Google Latitude and Yahoo Fire Eagle have been blowing up over the last year. But the whole idea of “check-ins” raise new privacy concerns for many social network users. Some view it as over-sharing, others have concerns about invasion of privacy or cyberstalking — which is why all of the most popular location-sharing apps have extensive privacy controls built in to their opt-in services.

Earlier this week, reports surfaced that Google is experimenting with rolling location-based features into Buzz activity streams, and that the company is even working on a new location-based ad format.

Photo: Mr Ush/Flickr/CC

Google Gets a New Geocoder

Michael Calore — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:47 +0000

Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map.

The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance of their apps through precaching.

First off, the new service employs the Google Maps JavaScript API version 3, which has a handful of improvements over the previous versions. Users will get more well-formed and easier to parse data from each request. The service can return full names as well as local-language abbreviations for countries, states and territories. Users also have the ability to apply multiple tags to each address component.

Second, the new service lets apps precache data. From the announcement on the Geo Developers blog:

The Geocoding Web Service is intended to enable precaching of geocoder results that you know your application will need in future. For example, if your application displays property listings, you can geocode the address of each property, cache the results on your server, and serve these locations to your API application. This ensures that your application does not need to geocode the address of a property every time it is viewed by a user. However we do ask that you regularly refresh your cache of geocoder results.

It’s important to note that the new service must be used in conjunction with a Google Map, generated either by the Google Maps API or the Google Earth API.

User-Contributed Announcements Give EveryBlock a Human Touch

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:24:15 +0000

EveryBlock, the local news aggregator that shows you block-level details about your city, has added a new feature dubbed, “Notify your neighbors,” which allows anyone in your neighborhood to post news on the site.

EveryBlock, which launched in 2008, touts itself as “a geographic filter” for your city or your neighborhood. The site crawls local newspapers, radio and television stations as well as local blogs, independent media sources and government data feeds to show you what’s happening on your block. At the moment EveryBlock serves fifteen U.S. cities, though the site is always taking suggestions for more.

While EveryBlock pulls in an impressive amount of data, it can’t hope to find everything about your block — for example, a private neighborhood listserv or other very small, self-organized neighborhood websites are either off limits or simply too numerous to crawl.

The new Notify feature is, in part, designed to overcome that by allowing you to post your own events, news and, well, anything really.

The EveryBlock blog calls the new feature “intentionally open-ended,” and is hoping that users will come up with novel ways to use it. Early beta previews were made available to select users who used Notify to do everything from post lost pet messages to chatting about howling cats and missing mailboxes (damn kids!).

The new feature is also part of the EveryBlock iPhone app, so you can post announcements as you walk down the street.

Within the site, user-generated posts are labeled as “announcements” and link back to the poster’s profile (so yes, you need to sign up before you can post).

So far the feature looks very useful and gives EveryBlock a human touch that sometimes felt missing in early incarnations. Whether or not it will help build a community or end up being overrun with spam remains to be seen.

See Also:

Get Your Fix of Hyper-Local News With Fwix

Michael Calore — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 17:54:53 +0000

Readers jonesing for local news on the web now have one more place to turn.

News website Fwix has emerged a strong contender in the quickly growing field of hyper-local news aggregators, sites which filter local and area news stories for you, showing you the hottest links in your ZIP code.

The site aggregates stories and videos from about 100 cities worldwide, mostly in North America. Each city has its own home page, and each city’s page has different sections for politics, crime, sports and other topics.

Local news headlines are presented with the newest stories at the top, so you get a constantly-updating river of news about topics you care about in the area where you live. New stories flow in as they become hot, appearing dynamically without a page refresh.

It’s a design of the times. Twitter and Facebook have turned us into breaking news junkies. Of all the hottest stories being passed around on the real-time web, few are more interesting than the ones happening closest to us, whether in our city or in our immediate neighborhood. And geoloaction tools in our computers, phones and even in our web browsers are making local content easier to find. To that end, we’ve seen a number of hyper-local news aggregators come down the pike. Sites like EveryBlock and Outside.in offer hyper-local experiences complete with maps, and larger sites like Google News give us the ability to filter results to state, county or city level.

Much like other aggregators, Fwix pulls content from a handful of mainstream news sources, like major area newspapers and local TV network affiliates, as well as social media sites and dozens of local blogs. Check out its long list of sources for the San Francisco bay area.

According to Fwix founder and CEO Darian Shiraz, who gave us a hands-on tour of the site, news sources are hand-picked by Fwix’s small editorial team. Users can also request the addition of a news source by submitting a URL on the Fwix website.

The free Fwix iPhone app, pictured at the top, adds another way in. It has a “Report News” button — click it and you can submit a photo of something happening in your city. So if you’re walking around and you see a building on fire or a gnarly car crash, take a photo with your iPhone and post it (after you call 911, of course).

For all of its depth, the year-old service isn’t yet perfect.

News headlines on the Fwix front page are chosen based on popularity, which is determined by algorithms written by Fwix (using disco project code). Popularity is largely measured by how many clicks a story has gotten and how many sources are reporting an event.

The results can get wonky. When San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum was busted for pot possession, there were three headlines about it at the top of the SF bay area page. All were from different sources, but since most news outlets just ran a wire story, each link had the same headline, the same summary and the same information. Likewise when Lincecum won the Cy Young award — everyone had the story, so the first three links on Fwix were all of the same.

Other hyper-local services have the same problem, but Google News deals with the issue rather elegantly by nesting headlines for related stories.

Also, Fwix isn’t yet a reliable source of breaking news. The day the Bay Bridge was shut down due to structural damage — a huge news event in San Francisco — there was nothing about it on the Fwix homepage even hours after it happened. Also, the bridge closure presented a perfect opportunity for users to submit relevant photos and tweets, but I didn’t see any show up on the website.

Still, while its method of presenting aggregated news may be more chaotic than what Google News offers, Fwix does surface a wider range of stories. Every time I’ve visited the Fwix home page or fired up the iPhone app since I began regularly using both a month ago, I’ve found at least one or two interesting headlines I never would have encountered had I been left to my own devices. Several times, it was something in my neighborhood that one of my favorite go-to local blogs had overlooked. By regularly visiting the site, I’ve discovered some great local blogs I hadn’t heard about.

Also, interesting videos show up often — something few other hyper-local news sites can claim.

While content providers and the large-scale aggregators continue to butt heads over who has the right to profit from news content, Fwix, relatively speaking, takes the high road.

The company has recently launched its AdWire service, an ad network that splits revenue with the site owners running the ads and the publishers of the stories they’re linking to, many of whom are hobbyists, citizen journalists or freelance bloggers.

Along the same lines, Fwix only posts very short, one or two-sentence summaries of news stories, then offers a clearly-labeled link to the original source, much like an RSS reader. The original story’s page is wrapped in a frame with buttons to share the link on social sites using Fwix’s own URL-shortening service. Click-through content frames are a no-no in our book, but at least this one is easy enough to dismiss. Just click the giant “X” button.

See also:

Twitter Puts Geotagging Tools in Place

Scott Gilbertson — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:51:05 +0000

Twitter has announced a new feature that will give users the ability to send their location with each tweet.

The new geotagging API tools are available only through the Twitter API, and are not part of Twitter.com just yet. So, if you’d like to post geodata with your tweets, you’ll need to use a third-party application that supports the new features. Expect updates to the most forward-looking clients soon.

The geodata tools are also opt-in, meaning that you’ll have to head to your account settings and check “enable geotagging” before any application is allowed to send geodata with your tweets. If broadcasting your location strikes you as an invitation to an Orwellian nightmare, just ignore the new settings.

Judging by the way Twitter has set up the API, the geotagging tools are intended mainly for mobile applications running on platforms like the iPhone or Android, both of which have GPS or similar sensors for detecting location and can offer geodata to applications. Approve the Twitter app of your choice to access your location and it can then send the geotags along to Twitter.

In addition to the obvious — the ability to search for nearby tweets — the added geo information opens up a whole new realm of Twitter mashups — travel guides, local music searches and most likely quite a few things no one has thought of yet.

It also serves as both a boon and a challenge to the various location-based games and services that have sprung up along Twitter’s coral reef. Services like Foursquare, Loopt and Gowalla, which exist as separate apps, but incorporate Twitter for passing status messages, will have the ability to geotag those status messages. Likewise, you could run a simple Twitter search for messages geotagged with the location of the restaurant you’re currently sitting in and get recommendations from other Twitter users about which menu items to try.

Of course given the opt-in nature of geotags (a good decision on Twitter’s part), searches looking at only geotagged tweets will likely be a minority sampling of what’s actually happening on Twitter.

Developers interested in using the new API in applications and mashups should check out the new documentation.

See Also: