Tweet and share your location

Last week I had put up MyBooth, where you could go to for figuring out your polling booth. Essentially this is a service built on top of Twitter messages. You send out a tweet with the GPS co-ordinates and tags for that location to @tweetaloc, in the following format

@tweetaloc <message> (:<location tag>:)* L:<lat>,<lon>:

The lat, long is reverse geo-coded from geonames.org to figure out the country code, state code and nearest place name, all of these and the tags that you provided are tagged on the location and available for search on MyBooth. Currently the interface does not allow you to search in a country other than India, will fix that up shortly.

Behind the scenes is some old fashioned perl and php and Amazon SimpleDB for data storage. Uses Net::Twitter and Geo::GeoNames to poll twitter for messages and lookup geonames for the location data. A simple php page pulls the data out and feeds to Google Maps API as a geo-rss feed. Thats it nothing much there.

The itch behind this was the inability to find some place which gave out the exact location of where I could go and cast my vote. Addresses in India are ad-hoc and locating a place with just the address in hand is not easy. Online map services do not figure out the address for this reason and the only thing that can work here is crowd sourcing, like what wikimapia.org allows people to do. But then on the road putting things into wikimapia , so thats where this thing fits in, use any twitter client from your GPS enabled device and send a tweet out and this takes care of the rest.

Couple of things that I might add in to this

• search by twitter-id and tags, so you can search for @jebui’s office
• search for tags around a given location, for things like polling booths within 5kms of my current loc
• query via twitter

Eagleeye – Fireeagle and Bangalore traffic

I have been using Fireeagle (FE), the location platform from Yahoo!, for some time and its great. It is a one stop place for location aware apps to take off. There are a dozen apps which update your FE location on a periodic basis, Navizon works great. But the real power of FE is going to be services powered by location information from FE. Take for example wikinear, wonderful stuff which gives you places of interest around your current location.

So then inspired by wikinear i have a mash up of FE and btis.in to give you a view of the traffic hot spots around your current location. This queries your FE location and then gets the live traffic data from btis for the current city that you are in. It orders the traffic information based on the distance and then presents it on a map in 3 sections. Hopefully that should give some warning of the spots to avoid when you are planning to go out. Traffic information for cities supported by the Mapunity API’s will be given out. So this is not Bangalore specific. Best used from a mobile device. Feedback welcome.

Here’s a snapshot