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Tag Archive for 'geolocation'

Facebook Places, the Mobile Perspective

Published

on August 20, 2010

. 2 Comments

Nearby Places - Android Browser Places, Check In Page - Android Browser

Facebook created a wave of excitement and consternation this week with the announcement of Facebook Places. It adds mobile check ins, ala Foursquare, to the Facebook iPhone app and the touch.facebook.com mobile webapp.

When you click the Places Tab or a new teardrop shaped icon next to the status box on your Facebook homepage or wall, Facebook uses your location to display nearby "Places" relevant to your interests (image top left). You can check in to a place, add new places and comment on the Place that you are checking into (image, top right). Your check ins appear on your Facebook wall (image, below right). By default only your friends can see your check ins but you can expose them to everyone, friends of friends, only specific friends or nobody but yourself by tweaking some reasonably straight forward (for Facebook) privacy settings.

The web is awash with analysis of the privacy aspects of Places and its impact on competitors like Google Buzz and Latitude, Gowalla and Foursquare. For the record, Gowalla and Four Square along with Yelp and Booya! are Facebook Places "partners" and shared the stage with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg at the unveiling. As Mashable's Ben Par pointed out, the competitors, especially Foursquare, are likely reluctant partners, but really don't have much choice. It's partner or be destroyed by the much larger Facebook.

To help you get started with Places, the New York Time's Paul Boutin has a good introduction to Places and there's comprehensive run down of Place's features, how to use them and the privacy options on this Facebook Help Page.

Place Page - Android Browser Facebook Wall With Place - Android Browser

Facebook Places is completely about mobile. There's currently no way to check in using the desktop version of Facebbook. The mobile web app is supposed to work with any mobile browser that supports the Location Provider API and "HTML5". Android and BlackBerry were specifically mentioned as being supported. I suspect BlackBerry support is limited to the new WebKit based browser on the Torch rather than the legacy BlackBerry browser.

I took Facebook Places for a spin with the browsers on my phones. It worked well in the Android 2.1 browser and the Samsung Wave's Dolfin browser. I was disappointed that the Places tab did not even show up in Opera Mobile 10.1 on my Nokia N95 (image, bottom left) even though that browser supports both location and a number of HTML5 features.

Facebook handles browsers that don't support location or where the user has disabled location support gracefully . In Opera Mini, taps on the Places tab are ignored and on an Android phone with location disabled the webapp immediately displays a message (image, bottom right)without blocking. However, unlike Foursqare and Lattitude, there is no way to manually check in by entering an address.

The original buzz around Foursquare and check in services in general seems to have died down. It will be interesting to see if Facebook, with it's 500 million users (Fourquare has about one million) rekindles the Buzz. A couple things that would help would be adding Places to the Facebook desktop site (I see more laptops than phones in use at Starbucks) and letting the fast majority of mobile users whose phone's do not support location check in by searching for a Place by name or address. I suspect Facebook is working on both.

No Places in Opera Mobile 10.1 Places, Location Disabled=

GeoMail - Mobile Geocoded Email Mashup

Published

Dennis Bournique

on February 22, 2010

in Mobile LBS

. 0 Comments

Geo Mail

Here's another cool webapp from Dmitry Namiot, the developer of mobile web based contact card service, Mobile Share (review). This one lets you send geocoded mail. It works with any browser that exposes the W3C geolocation API, currently iPhone, Android, Maemo and possibly others. The geolocation API has a lot of support from Google and others and I expect it to be a standard feature on mobile browsers in a few years.

Geo Mail provides an email form where you type your message title and body and choose whether you want to include a link to either a scrollable or static Google map or just your latitude and longitude. When you hit the "Send" button GeoMail opens your device's default Email app with the message and location information pre-populated, all you have to do is specify the recipient and send the email.

This seems like it would be handy for impromptu meet ups with friends who might be unsure of exactly where you were or how to get there. Anyone needing help with the location could click the link to open a mobile friendly map in their browser.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Mail-IM-Talk-PIM/Email

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: 2 "Bad"

Mobile Link: www.servletsuite.com/geomail/

KeyToss - Best Mobile Hotel Search and Booking Site Yet?

Published

Dennis Bournique

on April 27, 2009

in Hotels

. 0 Comments

KeyToss Search Form

I've been pretty dissatisfied with most of the mobile hotel search and booking sites I've tried. I don't know what it is about this category but hotel sites always seem to have serious usability problems; unnecessarily complex search forms, illogically sorted results, listings for hotels that turn out to have no availability, "bait and switch" pricing or prices buried several levels deep making comparison shopping unnecessarily complex.

This week KeyToss launched a new mobile hotel booking service at h.keytoss.com. I've covered KeyToss before. It's a personalized mobile homepage similar to iGoogle or NetVibes. I like KeyToss, it's feature rich and enables adding a lot more types of content than the rather limited mobile versions of iGoogle and NetVibes. According to KeyToss their hotel site is "...the Most Advanced Hotel Booking Service on the Mobile Web". That's a bold claim and I approached the site skeptically but with high hopes.

KeyToss is location enabled as much as is possible with current technology. It tries to use geolocation to find you so you don't have to enter your location. KeyToss can geolocate on Android and Windows Mobile phones using Google's Gears, BlackBerry's with the BlackBerry browser's built in location support and on the iPhone with the help of Alocola, a free open source app. KeyToss is not limited to the US either,covering 60 countries on five continents.

KeyToss Search Results

Even without geoloacation it's pretty easy to use KeyToss. The search form has only one required field, your location. If it hasn't been prepopulated by geolocation it will accept your free form entry of a neighborhood, address, landmark, city, airport code, postal code or geo-coordinates. The rest of the search form is prepopulated with logical defaults; one room for tonight, rated at least two stars, under $250, for one person, for one night. All of those can of course be changed.

The results seem to be mostly sorted by price, from lowest to highest. There doesn't appear to be any way to change the sort to distance from your location, which given KeyToss' geolocation ability, would be a great feature for trying to find a room at the last minute in an unfamiliar city.

The listings include only available rooms with the lowest available base price for each hotel shown right in the initial listing along with a link to a map. Clicking on a particular hotel in the list of results will give the bottom line price, including taxes and fees, and considerable detail on each property; amenities, available services and pet and cancellation policies. KeyToss iteself does not have a cancellation charge but individual hotels often do.

KeyToss gets its inventory from Hotels.com and seems to have a huge number of properties available. A search for a room for tonight under $100 (which is considered very cheap) in downtown San Francisco returned 85 results including a $99 deal at a well located four star hotel!

KeyToss Hotel Listing

By default, KeyToss lists up to 100 results on a single page. These pages are large, about 200 KB when images are included. That''s fine for the iPhone, Opera Mini or even the BlackBerry, but is obviously too large for most feature phones. To deal with this and make the site work on all phones, KeyTossprovides an option to paginate the results, 15 to a page, and another to disable images. Pagination reduces page size to about 40 KB and turning off images drops it to 9 KB. With both options I was able to use KeyToss Hotels on an old RAZR with Motorola's MIB browser and a couple low end Verizon LG phones running Openwave 6.2.3. However the Openwave 7.0 browsers of two Sprint/Nextel iDen Motorola phones claimed that even the 9 KB version of KeyToss was "Too large for available memory". Which is surprising as the same phones could load other pages as large as 30 KB. Which looks like an Openwave bug as KeyToss seems to be doing everything right here.

Booking a room with KeyToss is pretty easy too. If you have set up a profile with KeyToss in advance and included your credit card details you can book with just a click or two after signing in. If you haven't registered there's a click to call option. A discount code in each listing presumably insures that you will get the advertised price even if booking by phone. Finally you can book the old fashioned, non-mobile friendly way by filling out a typical 13 field form with name, address, phone number, card number, expiration date, security code, etc..

All in all, I think KeyToss lives up to it's claim as being the most advanced mobile hotel booking site. It's not perfect, I'd like to see it make better use of geolocation to identify the nearest hotels with vacancies and also use browser detection and adaptation to automatically deliver compatible results to all browsers. But the combination of a large inventory, ease of use and a format that encourages comparison shopping put it well ahead of the current competition.

Filed in: Wap Review Directory - Travel-Transit/Hotels

Ratings: Content Usability

Ready.mobi Score: "3 Fair"

Mobile Link: h.keytoss.com