Ryan Sarver shares the info on Twitter’s new location API. Looks really simple, and really nice.

curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d location="Arlington, VA" http://twitter.com/account/update_location.json

You can even use GET, which means bookmarkable location settings (similar to FireEagle)

http://username:password@twitter.com/account/update_location.xml?location=Paris,+France

There has been a number of GeoTwitter clients and applications show up. And a lot of discussion on alternate picoformats for location markup.

By extracting this away to Twitter proper, it means any application can set this information how they want, and have it updated in the user’s profile. One thing that is lost is the ‘home’ location of that user as their profile potentially becomes very temporal.

FireEagle as the central store is a good option, however it is just one location store and Twitter’s location will no doubt serve as the centralized location store for a number of new applications. As more social or personal applications gain location storing and sharing support, there is a question of how synchronization between these services will easily happen.

I don’t want to have to set my location in multiple services. This is the same problem that troubles social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and magnolia. This may become especially problematic if there were automatic updating services that detected a change in FireEagle and then updated your Twitter location, and vice versa - which then updates FireEagle from Twitter. Perhaps causing an implosion of the GeoWeb.

Yahoo Brickhouse finally released their new shiny FireEagle service. If you haven’t heard of it before, FireEagle is a user location brokering system. No more, no less. It provides a secure authorization system and interface to allow third-party applications to update a user’s location, or query a user’s location.

There have been, and are, other location sharing systems. Most recently, Plazes, TwitterVision, my.loki, Loopt, Dodgeball, and more coming online soon. However these systems were either hampered by being too much, not providing good interfaces, unclear security and authorization, and worst of all, user lock-in or siloing. Those services have great purpose and use and communities, but they aren’t the cross-application interfaces they could be.

What’s incredibly exciting about FireEagle is that it does one thing really well - and provides excellent hooks for using this information. It’s a service about user-geolocation enabling other applications. Its one of those services that a user comes to for signing up, but after that never needs to come back to FireEagle at all. Applications build in authorization, publishing, and accessing their location into their own interfaces.

And even better, you can publish your location from one system, say a mobile device, and have other applications access this, say from a social network site.

This concept follows the concept of loosely coupled systems. Other location sharing systems typically required all potential users to be members of that particular service, using that interface. For example, I can’t view locations of my twitter contacts in Plazes, or from a single mobile app - where a combined interface has utmost importance.

I’ve recently updated my blog, and included in the header my current location from FireEagle. I can now set my location via Dopplr, mobile phone, dashboard widget, or whatever cool next generation shoe tracking service, and have my site automatically get this - or view in FaceBook.

FireEagle will do for geolocation what GoogleMaps did for online maps, or Twitter did for small messaging exchange: Provide an underlying framework that developers can innovate on top of.

I explained before why the iPhone doesn’t need a GPS, and FireEagle makes this especially true. In the end, I just want it to be easy for me to share locations with people and use this for finding things around me. I don’t really care how that happens, I just want it to happen. And loosely coupled systems like FireEagle abstract away the geolocation method from the geolocation-sharing.

Unfortunately the blog is agog so far today with numerous posts by misunderstanding newszines that see it useful to bash FireEagle and comment on “lack of apps”, or “user base”. They’re not understanding the concept that FireEagle is a tool, not an endpoint.

I hope FireEagle doesn’t get feature-itis. Users and devs are asking for social networks, stored location names, and other features that each have their uses, in specific application spaces. But FireEagle is powerful for just the reason that it doesn’t do all these things. It’s like saying Amazon’s S3 needs to have “Friending”. External applications should be innovative with how they use and extend FireEagle.

You’re already seeing applications add integration. Dopplr will set your location once per day based on your trips, PresenceRouter helps join FireEagle into the other geolocation services. Dangerday is a Twitter bot that will allow you to publish to FireEagle from the plethora of Twitter applications and sites out there. FireWidget is a Mac OS X dashboard widget, and FireWrench is a GreaseMonkey script for polling your location in Firefox. There are a couple of other really exciting applications and interfaces to FireEagle that can be found with some lurking around (I leave this as an exercise to you the reader until the apps officially announce themself).

We’ve also built in FireEagle support into Mapufacture and will soon be showing off some of the really interesting things FireEagle lets us do for our users.

Jesse Newland has a very good ruby library, and I believe the Yahoo Developer Network will be putting up libraries for PHP, Python, Javascript, Java, Objective-C, and C#.

FireEagle is also using the new OAuth specification - one of the first large scale service to do so. Along the way they’ll have to do a lot of developer education on how to use OAuth, but it’s a leap in the right direction. Using OAuth it makes it simple to connect to multiple services without having to cater to as many unique authentication mechanisms. The pain is early in development but pays off in the end.

So developers - this is a call to you, go out and build cool stuff with FireEagle!

You may be surprised to hear me say this, but here is it — the iPhone doesn’t need GPS.

Macworld disagrees (via Directions Magazine). Specifically, Macworld said:

Add GPS support … [the iPhone] would be the ultimate mapping application if it knew where you actually were at all times

They’re confusing the issue. Geolocation does not mean GPS. GPS is a specific technology implementation of getting a location fix. It is also frought with complications that are most apparent in areas that people may use a mobile phone to find out what’s going on around them - that being urban areas, indoors, or anywhere that doesn’t have good sky coverage.

I have an N95 - that’s because I’m a geo-geek. I wanted to have programmatic access to my precise location so that I could write prototype applications for mapping, geolocation, and so forth.

I am not an average user

In fact, one of the most complained about features in the N95 has been it’s slow to fix GPS. Nokia finally got it better, from 74 seconds to 57 seconds, with their firmware upgrade.

That’s still almost 1 minute from turning GPS on (which doesn’t always happen automatically) to getting a location fix. That’s also probably in a decently clear area. This is all well and good - now I can see a moving dot in MGMaps (though not GoogleMap yet), or precisely geotag my photos.

Another problem with GPS - it’s a battery hog. I’ve killed my battery in several hours when using GPS, and even shorter if I leave the GPS on and indoors - leaving the processor to be constantly trying to calculate find GPS signals and parse their GOLD-codes (read more about how GPS works).

Personally, I get rather frustrated standing there (and anyone else waiting with me more so) staring at my phone, hoping for a fix so I can then take a photo. And remember, I’m a geek, I live for this pain - your average user won’t.

But I want my geo-aware iPhone!

My point is, geolocation does not mean having a GPS. There are numerous methods of automatically locating yourself that doesn’t require listening to satellites 24,000 miles away.

Cell Towers and WiFi are both simple, and accurate, methods of getting your location within 10 feet. This is the type of accuracy you may expect from GPS anyways. But you can get a cellular location or WiFi location in seconds - not a minute.

It also works indoors - and best of all (with respect to this post), the current revision of the iPhone has the hardware already. In fact, it would just be a software update to turn on geolocation on the iPhone.

The future is now

So I hope to hear less of people bemoaning the iPhone’s lack of a GPS chip - and instead ask the more reasonable question “Why doesn’t the iPhone do geolocation by cell or WiFi?” And while you’re at it, ask that the location gets exposed with Javascript hooks through Safari so web applications can make use of it.

You can still have your geotagged photos (what’s more interesting, that you were at [-23.538809, -46.618423] or São Paulo, Brazil?), find friends in the area, local pub search, or even maps near me.

If you want to see how something like that works - install the Loki Toolbar - which uses WiFi Geolocation - and then go to Mapufacture Search for automatic ‘nearby’ searching - no GPS required.

GigaOM is carrying the story about SkyHook’s WiFi positioning technology will be integrated into SiRF’s next generation GPS chips.

What this means is that hardware devices will be able to use a single solution to get both GPS Satellite positioning as well as WiFi positioning, essentially providing both a clear sky and urban-canyon/indoor positioning solution.

Therefore, these devices will be able to rely on positioning regardless of the visibility of the user to the sky - and provide LBS with a higher reliability.

There’s no word on when the first devices (looks like an iRiver media player) will roll out - or what their interface to applications will look like (single “what is my location?” queries?), but whatever it is, it will no doubt be very exciting.

The iPod/Nike kit is a really interesting use of some fairly new technology made really easy for most any person to just pick up and start using. Based on experimenting by devs/hackers, they’ve figured out how to pick up the RFID connection through their own devices, something that was very apparently possible from the moment the kit was announced.

There are all kinds of really neat things you can do with such a simple tracking device for pedometry (relative distance when GPS/cell geolocation falls out), location (you are at any number of places a sensor station is setup), tracking devices in races (they use expensive/proprietary tracking devices now), and so on.

But leave it to the media to do a hype piece and scare tactic on the cool technology. Here is a CNN video on the “bad things” you can do with it.

While the information and knowledge is good, they could have done better in talking about how useful it is, the potentially good and interesting things you can do with it, but also be aware of…