fireeagle

Got a #fireeagle invite off of twitter. This is cool.

It's a Yahoo location service/framework/thingy. Yahoo holds a 'location hierarchy', and you allow applications to see/change some level of that hierarchy.

So you might want one application to know where you are down to the city level ( restaurant recommendations, for instance ), and another to know your exact location. Like perhaps http://rescuemefromthemadkidnapper.com.

Sticking with my current twitter fetish, http://twitter.com/dangerday is a bot which lets you update fireeagle with your location and to query user's locations.

So on twitter you can find out where I was last prepared to admit to being with 'd dangerday q mawhin'.

Deeply cool.

Twitter use case

Colleges / tutors should have a twitter feed that students subcribe to.

So, students could get: last-minute timetable changes, reminders of assignments due, event announcements, freebies (only via twitter, to encourage usage).

And of course, it works the other way too. So if a student is working, and needs to ask a question, twitter it. Anyone following (the rest of the class, the tutor, possibly other tutors with expertise) can answer, and everybody gets the benefit.

I'm sure this has been done to death in HE, but it ain't about fashion, is it? It's about what helps.

web 2.0 agogo!!

I've not 'got' this web 2.0 stuff up 'till now, and have sorta gone along with the slashdot 'yeah yeah, get a life, nothing new, whatever' approach.

Until this weekend.

Now I'm beginning to get with the program.

Google Talk on my blackberry ( with unlimited business data plan, and that's the kicker, I suppose ) is lovely. 'Cos it's one way of linking up to twitter.

And through twitter I get - system status notifications from my network and service monitoring systems - and it's a separate notification channel to email.

And through twitter I get - iwantsandy.com.

And my colleagues and partner can see my personal calendar 'cos iwantsandy publishes an ical feed that google calendar can understand.

And I've recently started using blackberrytracker.com, and with yahoo pipes' help I'm thinking I'll be able to geocode my twitters, retrospectively, using the REST API that blackberrytracker provides.

It all relies on not caring about the cost of mobile data.

But given that, it all hangs together. I can finally get close to running my shizzle entirely from my phone, and that not be crap.

GPS Timesheet idea

Now I imagine I'm your average tech geek, in that I'd much rather spend my time developing 'cool stuff' than drudge work, like filling in my timesheets.

In fact, so much so that I'm regularly in schtuck with my boss over it. He's werry understanding, but still...

So, I've got use of a blackberry 8820 with GPS, and a couple of applications that will produce tracklogs. And I can relatively easily send them to my PC via bluetooth. And I know where I work.

So, how about this:

• keep the tracklogger on permanently.
• upload to my PC whenever I remember.
• persuade my PC to upload this to a webapp which..
• knows where I work.
• Will output a table (CSV export?) of when I arrived at work and when I left. Or at least a radius around where I work.
  

Now I think I can do this with what's available now. And I'm gonna have a go.

What would be better is the blackberry app that can twitter my current location every n minutes. So I build the whereaminow facebook app, etc, etc.

UPDATE Someones already done it, sorta. It's called blackberrytracker, but I'm stuck waiting for the registration email.

UPDATE Works great. Ish. Stay indoors too long, and the GPS fix starts to drift. So my three days at home sick looked a bit more like a busy day for a drug dealer. Hmmm. There's something called Kallman something that should help.