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Unnecessary use of location services

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Fandango is looking to track us ..: or at least that’s the impression this implementation of location services suggests. The “while using” option would be totally fine and expected and is what Movie Tickets has opted to do. Apple pushed the reminder about location being used in the background which is what suggested I even look …

I’m sure there’s a built in response for that’s how we can deliver “at theater” value but the main use case here is drop the tickets into passbook.

Quick update … Just got another notice for Apple’s Trailers app which also uses the same mechanism for location. Maybe I’m over thinking this but it really seems like overkill.

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Currently trending on Foursquare

@foursquare Trending Now

This is a very cool new way to show the live nature of the service …

This used to be what I had done in a particular area but seems to be
expanding quite nicely to include the broader population.  With a check-in happening  every second, this really becomes a real-time view into the world around you.

Foursquare currently works via app on iPhone, Android, Maemo and soon Blackberry. You can check-in via mobile web as well if you like. The latest update even let’s you (finally) check-in via GPS, so you no longer need an exact address.

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Google’s Favorite Places not quite that helpful

Today I caught a sticker in the sandwich shop by the office for Favorite Places on Google and decided to give the QR code a shot. Here’s what I got in return:

Sandwich Planet via Google Favorite Places

Reviews are helpful if I’ve never been t here before but needing to call or get directions (standing at the door) seems like a total waste.  Where are the daily specials, or perhaps a default to let me add my own review right away …   I was at least able to add it as a favorite, but I’ll need to open Maps on my desktop or Google Earth to get the benefit of saving it.  These types of services needs to be much more contextually relevant to matter.

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Apple’s cooking their own Social Location

Not too surprising to see, and frankly not real yet … 9to5Mac reports on a patent that covers a pending piece of Apple tech to match and enhance the capabilities currently found in Latitude – at least on the surface.  The goodies within the patent seem to indicate that geo-data will be able to extend to both sms and instant messages making it more of a system wide feature.

I’m hoping this leads to a more standard way to handle location data.  Apple seems “good enough” to start as a source for handling this … I just hope it’s not restricted to Apple only things.  That would be a very Nokia-like approach (Friendview anyone?) and one that while successful within it’s own world, would severely limit the opportunity.  On second thought it does actually sound a lot like what’s baked into Nokia Chat Ovi Contacts.

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Location, location, location!

In the past few years, I feel like I’ve tried just about every location service.  Some have certainly offered more than others, but one thing has been sadly consistent and that’s absolutely no consistency in access to your data.  If 2010 can bring one thing, I hope it’s a simplified and federated view into our location data.

Social location services are a very interesting area.  I’ve dabbled across various apps to try and find the magic but have come up short.  The potential is there, but because no one service or perhaps suite of tools enables

  • the right degree of privacy control
  • proactive friend notifications
  • base of users and importantly a way to contact each other either publicly or privately

A quick look back at the list of things I’ve tried in no particular order… Jaiku, Twitter, Latitude, Nokia FriendView, Loopt, Brightkite, waze, Stalqer, dopplr, tripit, fire eagle, Foursquare and Gowalla.  Of all these, only Fire Eagle and Dopplr currently talk and a quick check on Fire Eagle tonight revealed I am in Singapore yet I write this from Katonah, NY.  Dopplr actually knows that’s where I am but for some reason has not shared this info with FE … not that it matters for now.

There’s a clear issue with all of this.  There is no way to share my location data easily across services and situations.  Instead I have to explicitly state or open the app I want to use in order to have things update and shared across my social network.   Unlike status messages, location is not a subjective thing, it’s actual.  You can and should be able to share the degree of accuracy people see and Latitude does this well.  Even the two competing check-in services FourSquare and Gowalla do it differently… Foursquare requires and address if you want the place to be used by others while Gowalla places a pin on the map via GPS.  I prefer the GPS method personally as I almost never know or want to take the time to find the address to simply check-in.  If I fire Latitude up my location will be highlighted within a few moments, but that’s not something I can actually use.

Speaking of using … the three points I was initially making all clearly tie together.

  • I need to have total control over how my location information is shared.  I rarely want to show when I am in my home, but showing the town is cool.
  • With friends in the system, I want to know when they are close and see that as prioritized info in whatever view I’ve got within the app.  For some reason this is not the case with anything.  Latitude sorts randomly when you browse the map, Foursquare sorts by time and Foursquare, Gowalla and Stalqer give me updates on everyone regardless of where they are.  While there are some modifiable settings, it’s not even close to granular enough to be valuable in this context.
  • Having friends in the system is important and since this space is still fragmented there are too many options to choose from to find your friends.  Stalqer did an admirable job linking through Facebook, but Facebook doesn’t actually have a native location system.

Twitter and Facebook will probably duke this out in the end with some competition from Google.  Currently twitter supports location and you can geo-tag tweets via various mobile clients, but this information is so hidden from the main view, it’s essentially a waste to even bother.  Google has quite a few pieces behind the scenes, but so far has not taken them anywhere.  You’ll notice I’ve got a location widget on the sidebar of my blog which will show city-level views via Latitude.  Other than that Latitude is mainly a view only layer on Maps.

I’m sure 2010 will be a hype filled year for location services.  I’m really hoping we’ll see standards that will let these things work together.  I don’t want to entrust my location data to a single provider (yet) though if someone was able to develop the right open federation model it would make things very interesting.

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Google Latitude Location Alerts

latitude location alert

On my way home tonight I fired up Google Maps to get an address and since I use Latitude, I was also activating my location.  I got an sms telling me my friend and colleague Will was “nearby.”  I received the image above in an email with a similar message …

I actually had forgotten I had turned on these location settings, and now that I see how they really function, I have a few suggestions:

  • 50+ KM is not exactly a practical range for spur of the moment meetups for starters.  Will was 52km away when the alert triggered …
  • There’s no contact number in the sms alert which forces a few more steps to contact (call or sms) the person

I love the idea of social location and if you follow me across various services I’m sure you’ve noticed as well.  What Google is doing is trying to make it easy through the use of location history, but it’s still unclear how that works without constantly opening Maps.  I can’t afford to let Latitude project my location in the background all day as GPS tends to eat batteries …   I’m wondering if there isn’t some sort of data partnership to be had with the various check-in services (or even Yelp!) to augment the more direct GPS tagging you do with maps.  The more data in the mix here the more valuable the results.

Btw – Will developed the Michael Ruhlman Ratio iPhone app – be sure to check it out!

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Nokia closes FriendView

Just got an email from Nokia Beta Labs stating that FriendView is closing. No word on whether we’ll see this continue at some near future point integrated into maps or whether it’s just dead.

Frendview was an interesting service and for a brief time overlapped with my friends from Jaiku. Of course those friends were also Nokia users which was a hinderance towards Friendview’s broad acceptance compared to Google Latitude.

Google’s considerably more open approach integrated Latitude in Google Maps for Mobile and has made it the default mobile social location service. We’ll see if the Nokia perspective evolves though it seems like the house is still getting putting in order.

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Google Latitude Goes iPhone via Web App … sigh

So Google Latitude finally arrives on the iPhone and it comes through as a web app?! One one hand you have to admire the skill in which it was programmed by the Google team. Speed is nice and quick, features are rich including pinch zoom and it generally looks like a native app. But it’s not.

Native applications get different access … If this had been part of the actual Maps application – like it is on every Google Maps app that runs on every other platform, you’d have access to your favorites and it might even potentially run in the background – but not.

Instead apparently Apple demanded that it live as a web app over the native app Google had already written.  Apparently the reason is to avoid confusion between Maps and Latitude, yet on every other platform Latitude is a layer that simply loads on top of the map… This decision simply defies all logic for me.  The evolution of the platform goes to native apps from web apps as and back again?  NO!

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Nokia Chat becomes Contacts on Ovi

Nokia Beta Labs has updated / rebranded the Nokia Chat client into Contacts on Ovi and released versions for all devices except the S60 5th Edition platform which is really only the 5800 for today.  Nokia Chat and now Contacts on Ovi really is a great way to do IM on the go.  Aside from the simple IM handling you can also broadcast your location, send locations to friends and even send a voice message (gone in Contacts on Ovi).  In the latest version, you can also share your current music track much like on a desktop IM client.

What’s new, apart from the brand? I’ll have to first say that the
clients are in a better shape, we’ve resolved lots of bugs that have
been bothering you and us too. Secondly, we’re supporting lots of more
devices now. The new platform we have a client for is S60 3rd Edition
Feature Pack 2. It’s about time, right? We wanted it to look better,
and have more features in it. With the new client available for the
latest models you’ll be able to broadcast the music you listen as a
part of your personal message (for those of you that are in to XMPP,
I’ll just give out that it’s using the PEP extension, which you’ll find
supported in some PC clients too).  [Nokia Beta Labs]

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You have 10 minutes to get the F— out!

Location based services are something that’s been hyped for a years now. While everyone has heard of the coupon from Starbucks example, how about a real world practical use case?  The emergency system in Israel is the first time I’ve heard of anything like this and sounds very impressive.

The 10 minute warning system that Israel has been using to notify civilians in the vicinity of structures they will be bombing is fascinating. I could not find an online description of the system but the way it works is that civilian neighbors of a structure that will be attacked are given a 10 minute warning by phone to evacuate the area. It appears to be fairly precise given the counterproductive nature of giving evacuation warnings across too broad of an area.

Think for a second about what it would take to make such a system effective. First and foremost, they would have to have a map of every structure in Gaza, which is clearly something Google does on a daily basis, but then they would have to have a database of phone numbers attached to every person in each structure (remember this is predominately a mobile based telecom system). [Venture Chronicles]

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Where’s my Federated Presence?

It’s easy to maintain a single status line across services which lets you report the same update across your social services.  I tend to use Ping.Fm mainly which lets me deliver cross-service updates via email, IM and web including mobile.  What’s missing in this age of unified communications though is the ability to share a richer level of presence.  

By presence of course I mean my actual presence – am I in a meeting, on the phone, on the go or even in a different timezone from you.  All of this information can be relative input for deciding how to best get in touch with someone and there is still no way to do this effectively outside of the expensive enterprise route from companies like Cisco, Avaya, and Microsoft which also require that you use their solution exclusively without taking inputs from other sources.  Of course these inputs should be definable so I don’t share random personal bits with business contacts or important business information across to my Facebookfriends but I realize that’s a degree of complexity that might be more challenging.  Still even the “basic” federation for presence seems to be missing …  

The key thing here is that I don’t want anyone else to have to install or use a particular service for this to work.  I just want this solution to deliver the right level of detail to the right service so my various contacts are informed appropriately.  Not too hard right?

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Nokia Sportstracker Mobile Mapping

Sportstracker mobile mapping

Thanks to Jaiku and GerryMoth I just learned about a new release of Sportstracker which offers a real map of your location as you track your progress.  Previous versions showed a visual progress, but based on coordinates rather than a real map.  i believe this is the first integration of Navteq data outside the Maps application and it is working really well.