As I said, I enjoy taking a closer look at the search terms stats here at the no.5 blog every now and then. Without further ado: here’s another round of my recent favourites!

• lbs on the mobile without gps. Seems I get more of these and similar queries lately.
• symbian neighbouring cell ids. Yep. Another one.
• mobile javascript framework. Also a type of query that seems to appear more frequently lately.
• build a twitter interface. More geek-experimentation…
• twitter hardware. …and visionary geek-thinking…
• spacenavigator with picasa. …behind these queries?
• is mojax proprietary? Well… I guess there’s different opinions about that
• blog lan kwai fong meeting. I can only speculate about the objectives of this meeting…
• rise of mobile devices. I don’t know about you - but this scares me. (And this article doesn’t make me feel better, either…)
• lbs hype. Right. I just googled that as well. And guess what? GigaOM is still ahead of me. But at least I’m on the first page, too

Ok, maybe it’s time for Gartner to introduce a new type of hype curve: one with two peaks - to describe what seems to happen right now with location based services with the release of the GPS iPhone. (Or maybe they have that curve already, who knows. I’d call it ‘correlated hype cycle’ or something.)

Anyways: see this post by Om Malik which, to me, feels very much like the second coming of the LBS hype. I do agree to a large extent with what is said there. Yes, the rules have changed (as I noted in an earlier post): The technology is becoming cheap and prevalent. The potential audience is now global - via the World Wide Web - and no longer restricted to the customer base of a single carrier.

Still: as usual. I’m sceptical. Yes, the technology is in place. And yes, the development platforms are open to everyone now - which means we will see innovation and creativity in a way we haven’t seen during the first decade of LBS. But there’s one thing that not even the iPhone will change: applications have to (1) fulfill a true need and/or (2) offer instant gratification in order to succeed. And that’s actually hard to achieve for LBS.

Just a few thoughts: In general, most people are way less mobile than we LBS enthusiasts always like to think. (See a NYT article on the same study here.) In other words: the “I’m in a foreign town and can’t find my way to the nearest Starbucks” scenario might just not be that cool after all. And although I personally think that support for mobile & location would be a huge added benefit to social networking apps, not everybody out there may be as excited about Facebook, MySpace (or Xing if you’re in Europe) as we are. And finally: as compelling as the idea of location-based or “big” games may be: what good is an LBS game with 10.000 registered users worldwide when the nearest player online is ‘only’ 20 kilometers away?

Therefore - my old mantra: Yes, LBS are exciting. And I believe they will be big - just like map mashups on the Web are big and ubiquitous right now. And I believe they are a trend that’s here to stay. But let’s not fool ourselves: Just like most Web map mashups, LBS are also a niche thing. And the fact that the benefit of a global audience (and nowadays almost zero development cost) comes with the drawback of global competition doesn’t make things easier.

Many ideas that sound cool at first will fail. It will take time to identify user needs; to learn from the failures - and from the success of the few really long-running examples out there; and to figure out how applications and games need to be cleverly designed around the everyday habits and movement patterns of people to offer that instant gratification, without suffering from the critical mass problem. And if you ask me - that’s exactly what makes this topic so exciting

Sorry to my small but friendly blogloc ‘closed beta’ testing community. As you may have noticed, blogloc has spontaneously decided to take the weekend off for some unscheduled downtime last Friday night. This has, in fact happend the second time already and was due to a power outage at my hosting location (I swear!)

As I understood, they currently got construction work going on, and chances are that service will go down again occasionally over the next few days. So I apologize in advance. (To be fair though, these are the only outages I’ve encountered in a long time, so it’s really a case of bad timing… And, I guess, it’s simply the price I have to pay for the price I’m paying them )

On the positive side: the incident lead me to devise a cunning plan to minimize the impact of future outages on the mission critical aspects of blogloc. (And, yes, it involves routing map requests and GPS updates to my home PC if all else fails.)

In order to prevent that your blogloc map badge temporarily vanishes from your site during a server failure, please make sure you point to the following new URL:

<img src=”http://geekvault.dyndns.org/blogloc/img?user=yourusername” />

The old URL (geekvault.no5.at) will continue to work, but will take longer to recover in case anything goes wrong at my hosting location. Apart from that, I’m working hard behind the scenes to get blogloc’s feature set complete, so bear with me - and stay tuned!

…Google has officially posted the inner details of the My Location API, explaining the fact that they rely on Cell ID (and not triangulation) and crowdsourcing from GMM users with GPS-enabled phones (and not contracts with operators). Well, dear readers, you knew it all along (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Despite the (IMO) suggestive title of the blog post (”Google enables Location-aware Applications for 3rd Party Developers“) and a few words on the Google Gears Mobile and Android Location APIs, I just don’t see how 3rd party app developers can make use of Google’s cell ID data right now. Come on, where’s the usual, plain & simple Google-style HTTP API for querying cell ID locations? Thank god there’s OpenCellID

My new spare-time project blogloc is not even out of closed beta yet, and already people are finding alternative ways to use it! Lacking a decent mobile phone with a GPS (c’mon, it doesn’t even have 3G, jeez) Katz has elected to use blogloc as her personal “I would rather be here” sidebar widget, and not as the intended “I am here” map. May be a diversion from my original idea. But still - I like that

In case you haven’t heard about blogloc yet (say it ain’t so!): it’s the soon to be released easiest-way-to-put-a-map-of-yourself-on-your-website-and-update-it-from-wherever-you-are-whenever-you-want service. Still working on that tagline. Stay tuned.

The idea of using Google Earth as a platform for games is one that I’ve been fascinated with for a long time. Think Google Earth-equivalents to those browser-based, Flash-powered time-killers you might play during your lunchbreak! Think massive multiplayer! Think merging digital globes with online virtual worlds! (See some previous posts about it here, here, here or here).

Well, it seems that with the just-released Google Earth browser plugin and its (much more important!) full JavaScript API (another thing I wrote about some time ago) the time has finally come.

The Google people themselves have given a nice peek into what we might come to expect from developers all over the world in the next weeks and months with their awesome little Monster Milk Truck demo presented at the Google I/O conference yesterday.

More info on the Google Earth browser plugin is at Ogle Earth here or the Google Earth blog here and here. I say: bring on those Google Earth Minigames. I wanna play Tetris on the Red Square again

UPDATE: Regarding a technological marriage of Google Earth and Second Life, Keyhole co-founder Avi Bar-Zeev already has a compelling and concrete look into a possible approach. Involves embedding a browser control into a Windows native or .NET application, talking to the Google Earth plugin via COM instead of JavaScript, and using the now open-source Second Life client to pull the strings in the application part. Neat.

All right. As I said in one of my last posts, I really want one of those maps on my blog’s sidebar where I can share my current geographical location, directly from my GPS-enabled mobile phone.

I also said that there are several tracking services out there that give you a mobile client and an embeddable Google Map to do that. But these don’t work for my hosted WordPress blog, since wordpress.com blocks all JavaScript content and inline frames. And the mobile phone clients I’ve seen so far deliver a user experience and UI that’s far from great.

Sure, it’s only a matter of time until the existing services come up with slick mobile clients, complete with animated GUIs, eye candy and stuff. And until there’s a simple static image API for people who can not (or don’t want to) rely on a full-blown embeddable Google Map. In other words - I should just sit back, wait a few more months, and then pick the first solution that’s available out there for my blog. But then again… that would be boring, right?

That’s why last weekend I started to build my own personal GPS-phone-to-Web tracking solution. Say hello to BlogLoc (still a working title)! BlogLoc consists of two components:

• A simple service on the Web that stores user locations and provides a basic, static image API. To use the API, one simply needs to embed an appropriate <img> tag. The service will provide an image consisting of a detail map (street level scale), an overview map, plus an indication of when (and how) the last update took place. Below is what you get when you insert my location using

  <img src="http://geekvault.no5.at/blogloc/img?user=rainer" />

• A small (around 25kBytes) Java application for mobile phones that makes uploading the GPS location from the phone an (almost) one-click process. The client should work on pretty much any phone that supports JSR-179 (”J2ME Location API”). If your phone is Java-enabled, and has built-in GPS, chances are it will work just fine. (I’m using it on the Nokia N95. Screenshots are shown below.)

The whole thing is still in “closed beta”, meaning it’s not quite ready to accept users just yet. I’m still working on some missing parts (like a decent BlogLoc landing page for example), and plan to add a few more necessary features (e.g. a Web/map front-end where users without a GPS-enabled mobile phone can set their location manually; also, I’m considering a non-JSR 179 version of the mobile client to be used with Bluetooth-capable phones and an external GPS unit, in case there’s demand for that).

In any case, I’d be happy to hear your feedback and whether anyone else is interested in using this as well. (So far there’s at least one request from a hard-blogging friend of mine )

Just a quick “news plus links to remember” post: Both Google and Yahoo! are opening up there geographical indexes - Yahoo! with the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform and Google with a soon-to-be-released GeoSearch API.
[Via The Map Room and Google Earth Blog]

And one more: Though there have been a few Flash-powered Google Maps apps out there before, no official Flash API support was available for Google Maps until now. No more. Yesterday, Google has officially released a Google Maps API for Flash.
[Via Google LatLong]

Over the weekend I took some time to thoroughly test drive the Nokia N95’s Internet-based A-GPS. First off: the experience of using apps like Google Maps or the Nokia Sportstracker with it is just excellent. Blazing fast fix times (30 seconds to a minute, maybe) and reliable signal reception. Even works indoors with no trouble.

I also tested out a service called ipoki. ipoki provides a platform for you to share your location with the public over the Web, similar to what e.g. Plazes, dodgeball, Livecontacts , Brightkite or a whole lot of other location-enabled mobile social apps will let you do. ipoki also comes with it’s own mobile application, which is available for Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Symbian devices. They’re calling it the ipoki “plugin”. (It’s really just a Java/.NET application. IMO calling it a “plugin” doesn’t make it look any cooler or less technical. But as long as they’re happy with the name, I’m fine with that. Eeeeven though the technical purist in me is… you know… irritated. ) UPDATE: Technical purist I may be, but I have also undeliberately exposed myself as a NON-SPANISH-SPEAKING technical purist. Thanks to Javier for pointing out that “plugin” in spanish sounds like “small app” - which is ok for an excuse

Anyways, I installed the “plugin” and - while it definitely won’t win a beauty contest in it’s current state - it works and is easy to use. Capturing GPS location and syncing it to the server is effortless, and there’s also a ‘map’ feature that will show you a static Google Map image of your location with options to zoom in and out. Neat. Once your location is synced, other people can track you on a Google Map (see mine here) or via a KML network link in Google Earth. The website even has a mobile-friendly version that’s using a static Google Map instead of the JavaScript-ed desktop one.

The process of syncing your location to the Web from your phone with ipoki is actually fun (yes I know I’m a very strange person), and for what it’s worth, I would definitely want to have a map of my ipoki location on my blog’s sidebar! ipoki does give you the option to do just that, i.e. they provide a link to embed your map elsewhere. Trouble is, however, that my hosted wordpress.com blog doesn’t allow me to add JavaScript code…

So: what I really want to see is an API that will give me nothing but a static Google Map with my current ipoki location on it. Think something like

<img src=”http://ipoki.com/maps/rainer?width=240&height=320>

you get the idea. I don’t think ipoki - or any other service out there, for that matter - currently does this. Correct me if I’m wrong! Hm. Maybe I should start building something like that myself. Now that I got so much more time on my weekends again

Wow. This should seriously get me Paul’s and Katja’s undivided attention

According to this article in Austrian newspaper Der Standard, T-Mobile has announced in a recent press conference that Austria will be among the first countries to get the 3G iPhone (iPhones, in fact). [Found via Wired.com Gadget Lab].

In the mean time: here’s the much-needed ‘cold shower’ to cool down all you Apple fanboys and -girls out there (Thanks to Joesonic for pointing us there.)