mobile geo social

The good people at MitchelLake recently asked me to write an article about mobile technology.

So I created a list of awesomeness, innovation and disruption, including topics such as ‘Mobile is big’, ‘Phones are getting better’, and ‘People pay for stuff on their phones’.

Here’s the full article; 10 awesome, innovative and disruptive things about mobile.

I popped into the OpenAustralia Hackfest at the weekend to learn and talk about some of the latest developments in the Gov2.0 revolution.

There are now some quite interesting public datasets available, and the developer community is hard at work turning this data into useful APIs, and building innovative applications to consume the data.

Some of the notable apps to emerge from OpenAustralia include:

• It’s Buggered, Mate – from the Canberra Hackfest, a geo app to crowdsource the reporting of broken public infrastructure.
• Suburb Matchmaker – the winner of the Sydney Hackfest, a tool to help you find your ideal suburb to live in.
• FridgeMate – currently winning the MashupAustralia contest and only a couple of days away from the $10,000 prize. FridgeMate lets you assemble a map of local public amenities to stick on your fridge door. My advice to the Creative Possums behind FridgeMate would be to look at using the Zazzle API so people could buy the actual fridge magnet.

My own presentation focussed on some mobile, geo and social technologies to create location-aware mobile mashups to share OpenGov content with friends on Twitter, friends on Facebook, and *real* friends on a t-shirt. Here’s the deck:

When hiring Engineers, I always look for evidence of pet projects, so recently I thought it was fair to create one of my own: GeoMeme, the fun way to measure and share real-time local twitter trends.

Visitors to GeoMeme choose a location on the map, and two search terms to compare. GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the bounds of the map, based on public data from a number of mobile twitter apps.

As an example, GeoMeme can work out that ‘love’ beats ‘hate’ in Manhattan:

GeoMeme is a desktop web application and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones.

Implementing the mobile version of GeoMeme as a web app has some advantages and disadvantages, compared to building native iPhone &/or Android applications.

Native apps are great because they currently offer the deepest integration to the full capability of the phone, for example using device APIs to access Contacts, the Camera Roll, an Accelerometer, or the GPS chip. For some applications, this deep device integration is essential and so a native application is beneficial.

On the other hand, emerging HTML5-based mobile browsers are aiming to standardise integration to such device APIs, starting with Geolocation APIs; meaning that location-aware mobile web apps are now becoming viable. Aligned with this development is the new version of the Google Maps API. v3 has been greatly simplified since v2, and is now optimized for use on mobile phones. Less is more.

The deciding factor for me choosing to build a mobile web app for GeoMeme rather than a native app was development speed. A mobile web app enjoys far greater code re-use from the desktop web version, and it is possible to push regular updates and improvements to users, without having to wait for appstore approval or for users to upgrade.

I believe this need for development speed is common among a good proportion of mobile apps that are still in ‘rapid iteration’ or ‘release early, release often’ mode, so this post is intended to share some of the techniques used in GeoMeme with developers wanting to build their own location-aware mobile web apps.

Let’s build an example location-aware mobile web app called ‘Here I Am!’, for the photographically challenged. The app will present some local photographs (from Panoramio) which can be shared with friends on Twitter or Facebook.

Where on earth is that mobile phone..?

The first job of a location-aware mobile app is to work out where on earth the mobile phone currently is. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is still no universally reliable and accurate solution for a mobile web app to detect the location of the mobile phone it is running on. However the following partial solutions can be combined to good effect:

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GeoMeme is a pet project of mine. It’s a web app, and also a mobile web app for iPhone and Android, that measures real-time local twitter trends.

Visitors to GeoMeme choose a location on the map, and two search terms to compare. GeoMeme then measures and compares the number of matching tweets within the bounds of the map, based on public data from a number of mobile twitter apps.

As an example, GeoMeme can work out that ‘District 9′ beats ‘Inglorious Basterds’ in Manhattan.

As well as offering users the normal pan and zoom controls to move the map around, GeoMeme also introduces an innovative geo-autocomplete control which is powered by the geocoder service from Google Maps v3 API and the new Static Maps v2 API.

This blog post shares some details of how the geo-autocomplete control works, and offers some code so you can build your own geo-autocomplete controls.

1. Based on a partial location typed by the user, obtain a list of possible matching locations:

If the user has already typed ‘San’ into a form field, we can obtain a list of possible matching locations by passing this partial location to the geocoder service from Google Maps v3 API, as follows:

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Exciting news: Xumii has been acquired by Myriad Group (SIX:MYRN). We are now part of Europe’s largest mobile technology business with software in more than 2 billion phones.

This is great for Xumii as it means we can take our mobile social networking platform to the next level. And it’s a great win for Australian mobile technology.

Here’s the press release and some of the blogosphere coverage: GigaOM and TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

I am pleased to announce the launch of GeoMeme, the fun way to measure and share real-time local twitter trends.

I got thinking about this when a recent Los Angeles earthquake was being measured in tweets per second rather than using the Richter Scale.

Then came the Magnitwude Calculator as a standard way to measure the magnitude of Twitter trends.

[Then came twotspot.com but that domain name was just too damn rude, so it was quickly renamed to GeoMeme.]

What does GeoMeme do?

GeoMeme measures real-time local twitter trends.

Tweeps are located on the map using public data from a number of iPhone twitter apps. When twitter launches its geolocation API, that will be used to locate even more people on the map.

GeoMeme measures and compares how many people on the map are tweeting about each of your two search terms:

The ‘magnitude’ of each search term is equal to the number of unique people tweeting per hour per square kilometer, so it increases when more people are tweeting in a smaller area.

Example: if 100 different people in an area of 10km² have tweeted about ‘love’ in the last 2 hours, the magnitude is 5.0 (100 divided by 10 divided by 2).

So you can search for ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and GeoMeme works out which one “beats” the other with the higher magnitude.

The default search terms are and smiley faces which provides a good measure of local happiness, as an example.

Can I use my iPhone?

Sure, or your iPod Touch. Here’s the screenshot:

Give me an example!

Thanks to some early coverage on The Register, Mashable, and Google Maps Mania, and winning Mashup of the Day on ProgrammableWeb, we’re off to a flying start. I’m glad GeoMeme is hosted on Google App Engine for scalability.

Here’s a selection of the most popular GeoMemes so far:

• beats in New York City
• Mega Shark beats Giant Octopus in LA
• Snow Leopard beats Windows 7 in Cupertino
• bridge beats swimming in San Francisco Bay
• wtf beats ftw in Washington

How does it all work?

I will leave the details of how it all works to another post, stay tuned for that.

2009 has already seen some big Twitter moments, including Michael Jackson’s death and memorial service, #iranelection, Oprah’s mainstreaming, and the race between @aplusk and @cnn to reach 1 million followers.

But how can we objectively measure and compare the scale of such things?

A little while ago I got thinking about this when a Los Angeles earthquake was being measured in tweets per second rather than using the Richter Scale.

And now here is my solution, the Magnitwude Calculator, which measures the current magnitude of tweets on any topic within any location.

Please have a fiddle. Type in a search term or select from the autocomplete list of currently trending topics, move the map around, and tell me what you think:

You can link directly to the Magnitwude Calculator at http://hitching.net/magnitwude

Today I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), learning about Multi Platform Content, and talking about Mobile Social Technology & Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG).

We examined some emerging mobile social technologies, and how they can enable new forms of story-telling. And we shared my personal journey into a Star Trek Alternate Reality Game which has so far involved me sending pictures of sheep to strangers in Paris, and which explains my recent cryptic Twitter and Facebook status updates. Well some of them anyway.

The slide deck is embedded below, and contains all the links for those of you who asked.

[Update 3 June 2009] OMG! I was chosen as one of the five finalists in the game. Here’s a video of Leonard Nimoy putting my name into the hat to pick the winner.

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We’re going to DEMOfall ‘08, how exciting! Stand 61.

Thanks to the wonderful MoFuse I have been able to launch two mobile websites while sitting in bed tonight; iphone.hitching.net if you are one of the 1,000,000 people who bought a shiny new iPhone 3G over the weekend, and m.hitching.net if you are still waiting in line.

Clicking on those links from your web browser will launch a handy emulator if you want to pretend that you have an iPhone 3G.

MoFuse also makes it easy to migrate your audience from web to mobile; here’s the SMS widget (US cellphones only) and QR code:

Today Xumii moved out of stealth mode and into public beta, with integration to Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, Google Chat, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM and Flickr on over 100 different devices.

qik is live video streaming from your mobile phone; perhaps the next killer mobile app? Certainly the data charges would be near fatal in Australia, at 3Mb per minute for a 320 x 240 x 15 fps stream.

Here’s looking forward to mobile data plans that encourage mobile user generated content rather than mobile user generated discontent, and here’s Jack & Luke streaming via N95: