Peter Batty gave a presentation at the GeoWeb conference last week that has generated quite a lot of positive press. In the presentation Peter explains his thoughts on the future of location based social networking, as well as introducing his future location service whereyougonnabe (more of which tomorrow).
I really like Peter’s distinction between current and future location applications and I thought it would be interesting to have a quick look at the examples he gives of each type of application. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at future location services but today I’ll concentrate on the examples of current location applications that he mentions in the presentation.
Zkout Zkout connects users to their friends and to recommended places that are near by. Zkout automatically tells your friends what you are doing and where you are in real time from your mobile phone or computer.
The service allows you to explore what’s happening in your area right now on Google Maps, find out where your friends are and what they are doing right now and it also allows you to share videos and pictures from your mobile phone.
FireEagle Yahoo’s FireEagle is still in invite only beta. If you can get an account FireEagle lets you share your location with sites and services online. In essence FireEagle is an intermediary between your location devices (phone, lap-top, GPS etc) and location based web sites like Google Maps.
Lokilets you share your location with your friends via Google Maps. You can change your location at your own MyLoki page or (and this is the clever bit) you can download the Loki toolbar for your browser and update your location automatically.
The Loki toolbar can triangulate your location automatically. You can then share your location with your friends in a number of different ways. You can share the address of your own public page or you can embed a map in your blog to show your last recorded location or add a map to your Facebook account.
Dodgeball Google owned Dodgeball is a mobile phone service that lets you find friends near by and inform any friends near by of your location. The service lets you ‘crush’ on friends on-line and also tells you when your ‘crush’ is near by.
Dodgeball also informs you of venues that are near your current location.
Where.com Where.com have a number of location based widgets for your mobile phone. The widgets will help you find venues in your vicinity or connect you with friends nearby. Where.com delivers the best in local information from Eventful, Yelp, GasBuddy, Zipcar, ShopLocal, Starbucks, Buddy Beacon and more.
Postscript Anyone wondering about Peter Batty’s surname might be interested to know that the name is common in Yorkshire, England and is often used as an example to show how genealogy can be used to illustrate social migration over time.
The two maps above show how the name Batty has migrated southwards in the UK between 1881 and 1998. I obtained the maps from National Trust Names.
“Artist Erik Nordenankar says he has created the Biggest Drawing In The World. He says he gave DHL a case and travel instructions for a 55-day journey, then traced the route using GPS. The route was more than 100,000km long and went through 62 countries. The result was a self-portrait.”
Hilarity ensues when road painters marking no-parking areas on a road in Waltham Abbey, Essex, paint the wrong side of the road because they read the map upside down. (This is not the upside-down map the Australians had in mind.) Via All Points Blog.
ScapeToad is software for making cartograms. André Ourednik, its development supervisor, writes: “ScapeToad is a cross-platform, open-source application written in Java, designed and using the ESRI Shapefile format for input and output. It also exports maps in SVG format and is provided with a user-friendly cartogram creation wizard which guides the user throughout the map creation process.”
Noise maps only cover cities, but cover day noise (Lden) and night time (Lnight) noise levels 4 Layers are available - Road, Rail, Industry and Air noise.
The Noise Mapping England site currently supports the following urban areas only:
Birkenhead Blackpool Bournemouth Brighton Bristol Coventry Hull Leicester Liverpool London Manchester Nottingham Portsmouth Preston Reading Sheffield Southampton Southend Teeside The Potteries Tyneside West Midlands West Yorkshire
“The noise maps have been produced by Defra to meet the requirements of the Environmental Noise (England) Regulations 2006, and are intended to inform the production of noise action plans for large urban areas, major transport sources, and significant industrial sites in England. Directive 2002/49/EC - more commonly known as the Environmental Noise Directive (END) - concerns noise from road, rail and air traffic and from industry. It focuses on the impact of such noise on individuals, complementing existing EU legislation which sets standards for noise emissions from specific sources. The END requires: the determination of exposure to environmental noise, through noise mapping; provision of information on environmental noise and its effects on the public; adoption of action plans, based upon noise mapping results, which should be designed to manage noise issues and effects, including noise reduction if necessary; preservation by the member states of environmental noise quality where it is good.”
