I want to be able to share my location with my friends on social media. Twitter (RIP) had a way to attach an optional location to a post. Facebook still lets me check in to venues. But neither ActivityPub (Mastodon) nor AT Protocol (BlueSky) allow me to do that. I've been banging on about this for a while so was delighted to be invited to chat with the GeoSocial Task Force on their monthly call. …
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What is this, 2016? I like sharing my location with my pocket friends sometimes. If I'm in a cool bar that they know, perhaps they can recommend a drink. If they live nearby, maybe they want to come for dinner. Not everyone has FourSquare's SwarmApp, so it is handy to automatically share its updates with other people. Of course, Swarm doesn't cross-post to social media because walled-gardens…
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I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…
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My wife and I run OpenBenches. It's a niche little site which lets people share photos of memorial benches and their locations. Most modern phones embed a geolocation within the photo's metadata, so we use that information to put the photos on a map. Google's Android has now broken that. On the web, we used to use: <input type="file" accept="image/jpeg"> That opened the phone's photo picker…
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My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a (somewhat) solved problem. Services like OpenCage, StadiaMaps, OpenStreetMap,…
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I used to like the original FourSquare. The "mayor" stuff was a bit silly, and my friends never left that many reviews, but I loved being able to signal to my friends "I am at this cool museum" or "We're at this pub if you want to meet" or "Spending the day at the park". So, is there a way to recreate that early Web 2.0 experience with open data and ActivityPub? Let's find out! This quest is…
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Peugeot's new mobile advert has a couple of critical flaws - but has just enough innovation to redeem it in my eyes. Read on to find the two basic mistakes they made, how to solve them, and the cool feature you should be incorporating into your adverts. (more…) …
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As part of my project to create a mobile polling station locator site, I've been playing with various mapping APIs. As a base experiment, I passed the postcode of a polling station (GU22 7DT) to both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Here are the results. - Two things of interest to note. Firstly, Google has a specific "Mobile" call in the API, it reformats the map image to be more readable on…
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