Blog - MapMyGlobe

I just watched Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s WWDC 2008, so let me first briefly give my take on the event:

• MobileMe is nothing really new except for Apple’s nice”level of polish”
• the whole lot around the iPhone in corporate environment sucked
• however, the games do look very promising (but you already know that if you’ve been smart enough to jailbreak your device)
• more importantly, the AppStore is a big change in the way software is delivered from developers to users. And by users, I don’t mean computer geeks but real, mainstream users. I’ll write more about that later.

But of course, the anouncement that’s most interesting to us, is the fact that the new iPhone 3G will contain a GPS and will enable auto-geolocating and geotagging. The first application is that the built-in camera will be able to add geotag metadata into each photograph (via the picture’s EXIF metadata). This is really great. You’re going to be able to upload a pic to a CMS on the Web and have it geolocated without even bothering to tell where you are. And the iPhone always asks for your permission to send your position so you shouldn’t have to worry about privacy and safety.

This is also a door wide open for geo-social networking, which is to say, connecting with your friends nearby, which is, after all, what a phone is all about in the first place. The geo-social networking app that’s introduced in the keynote is loopt, lets your friends know where you are and lets you know where they are. It also works as a Twitter-like app, as well as a Geo-recommendation app like tellmewhere and so many others. Which of these players will reach critical mass in this highly innovative - in terms of usage - space is still unknown but the battle will sure prove interesting to watch.

In any case, as Steve Jobs put it, location-based services are going to explode, and I’m not going to contradict that

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the exhilarating avenues opened by the advent and popularization of geo-conscious mobile devices, that is to say, mobile phones that can tell you - and other people or machines - where you are. This subject is, of course, deeply connected to geographic knowledge applications like MapMyGlobe.

As long as users access your app from their broadband, fixed connection, there’s only one main way to achieve geolocation, through IP addresses and databases of uncertain precision.

However, as more and more users browse Web 2.0-type apps from their handheld devices the precision as well as the variety of possible ways to geolocate them are increasing dramatically.

First, you can always resolve the device’s IP address in the same way you used to do it for fixed lines. The IP address is your network carrier’s, and this will give you, at best, a city-level precision.

From the phone and the network carrier’s point of view, now, another solution is to identify cells you’re receiving signals from, and triangulate them so as to get your position from the cell towers’ positions. This is better, but is still not that precise: in cities, interferences between waves and rebounds on buildings cause losses of precision, while in the countryside a single cell tower covers a very large area. It also implies you need to be connected using your carrier’s network, which might prove pricy and slow depending on your country and service plan

A remarkable way of achieving the same thing, possibly much more precisely, and while using a regular Wifi connection, is through the use of a MAC address-location mapping. The company that got to popularize this service is called Skyhook Wireless and they provide the impressive Wifi geolocation service for the iPhone. The way they work is that they basically just cruise around U.S. and European cities in a Wifi-probing GPS-enabled van and write down Wifi routers’ MAC addresses and geographic coordinates, a practice known as wardriving.

You can also, of course, directly use a GPS-enabled device (or Galileo in a few years…), which are more and more widespread.

Finally, if we look forward at a few years from now, cell phones will most certainly contain a RFID chip - so that you’ll be able to use your phone as a credit card or transportation ticket. So if there’s a critical mass of RFID sensors out there, which is probable, you’ll be able to track people directly from the actions they make or the things they buy. It doesn’t even require you to use your device as a phone anymore, as this geolocation scheme will rely on its own, external network - a Supranet. Of course, this is further away from today, and it will cause severe privacy and security issues. But is also opens worlds of possibilities in terms of services and applications.

As you can see, there are more and more different ways to geolocate your users. In a future post, I’ll write about how I think the ability to easily locate users on a Real-time basis can prove revolutionary in web applications in general, and in Content Management Systems in particular.

Okay, I haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been pretty busy with my day job and have lacked the time to complete my refactoring of the source code so far. But don’t worry, some day I’ll finally find the time and do it

In the meantime I’ll write about a few things I’ve been thinking about lately, mainly about mobile devices and geolocation. Then I’ll tell you how I could use those in MapMyGlobe.

Ceci est ma réponse à un ami qui me demandait de lui expliquer ce qu’est MapMyGlobe. Retrouvez la discussion complète ici

Salut Romain,

merci pour ton intérêt. MapMyGlobe CMS c’est un CMS (Content Management System ou Système de Gestion de Contenu en français) basé sur des cartes. Les CMS sont un peu les briques de base d’Internet : quand tu crées un site tu utilises des fondations solides au lieu de tout recréer à partir de zéro. Il y a 2 grands types de CMS: ceux où seul l’administrateur du site, ou une petite équipe de rédaction, peut créer du contenu. Par exemple, les blogs (Wordpress, Blogspot…). Et ceux où toute une communauté peut participer. Par exemple, les wiki (MediaWiki qui fait marcher Wikipedia…) ou les forums. MapMyGlobe CMS peut être utilisé dans ces deux paradigmes, car il suffit de changer un paramètre de configuration pour changer les droits d’accès requis pour créer du contenu.

Maintenant, un phénomène important du Web aujourd’hui est la croissance des informations géolocalisées. Une raison pour cela est que le Web est de plus en plus mobile. Cela est vrai dans les pays riches, mais même dans les pays en développement, la plupart des gens surfent ou surferont bientôt sur Internet à partir de leur téléphone, et non à partir d’un ordinateur fixe. Ainsi le Web devra évoluer pour offrir à tous ces utilisateurs mobiles l’information la plus pertinente relativement à leur position géographique.

Une autre raison est le fait que le Web grand public repose sur la publicité, et que pour l’instant la publicité sur Internet répond mal aux besoins des petites entreprises locales (le café du coin) car par exemple chez Google, on ne peut pas acheter le mot-clé “café” seulement dans tel ou tel arrondissement de Paris. Pourtant la publicité locale est la partie cachée de l’iceberg, la base d’une pyramide de revenus colossale !! Par exemple, si tu es déjà allé au ciné en province, tu as dû rigoler en voyant que le boulanger du coin avait réalisé son petit clip de pub avec les moyens du bord. C’est aussi pourquoi la télévision locale commence à prendre de l’ampleur (les 4 nouvelles chaînes TNT Ile-de-France).

Pour en revenir à MapMyGlobe CMS, mon souhait est de créer un socle Open Source à toutes les applications Web qui ont besoin de présenter de l’information géographique. Pour l’instant chaque administrateur de site doit tweaker sa propre carte Google Maps et gérer le code source correspondant, ce qui est très fastidieux. A plus long terme, on pourrait énormément étendre l’envergure technologique (et commerciale) de l’application, par exemple en l’interfaçant avec les dispositifs de géolocalisation (GPS ou autres) des appareils récents, ou en mettant en oeuvre des algorithmes d’extraction de données pour trouver les informations géographiques pertinentes sur un intranet d’entreprise, par exemple.

Voilà pour MapMyGlobe CMS. MapMyGlobe.com, maintenant, peut être vu comme un site de démo du moteur CMS. Son ambition est de permettre aux “touristes virtuels” de collaborativement créer des cartes et ainsi de partager de l’information localisée avec leurs amis, voire avec la communauté d’utilisateurs toute entière. Je pense que tu conviendras que même si l’interface n’est pas encore parfaite, il est amusant de marquer sur la carte ses endroits préférés, de les éditer, et de les partager.

A non-neglictible part of this blog’s readers come for my Facebook scripts, which aim at automating a few things via javascript. One of those readers recently suggested a utility for automatically deleting friends. The reason for that is that he’s so popular he hits the 5,000 Facebook friends limit and can’t add any of the 11,000 peeps that sent him a request So, a workaround would be to first delete all of his current friends to make room for the new ones.

Now, my solution is not perfect because Facebook displays friends within a 50-items paging system. Which means you would need to run it 100 times to get rid of all your friends. Still, that’s a 50x improvement ratio if you really do need to delete your friends. The code is the following:

var remove = $$('a.remove');
for (var i = 0; i < remove.length; i++){
  remove[i].onclick();
  $('dialog_button1').click();
}

which you need to run at http://www.facebook.com/friends/?all. I also wrote a Greasemonkey script here or at http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/24199. Hope that helps somebody

Just registered MapMyGlobe CMS (the software that runs www.mapmyglobe.com) on SourceForge.net. I haven’t released an up-to-date version of the source code yet, though I’ll do it pretty soon. The project’s UNIX name is mapmyglobe, and the project’s page can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mapmyglobe/. Please contribute!

Registering an Open-source project on SourceForge gives you Shell access to a Web and CVS/SVN server, so, out of curiosity, I used it to list the projects whose names start with map. There are 128 of them (out of 171,554 total), the complete list being:

map, map2owl, map2xml, map3bspc, map4use, map500conv, mapaaudio, mapache,
mapache-weblog, mapalyzer, mapaphoto, mapassembler, mapasuta, mapatorium,
mapbased, mapbender, map-blog, mapbox, mapbrowser, mapbuddy, mapbuilder,
mapcal, map-catalog, mapchan, map-connector, mapcraft, mapcreator,
mapdataviewer, mapdb, mapdload, mapdown-bf, mapdrive, mapdrv, mapeasy,
mapeaudio, mapeb200, mapedit, mapeditor, mapeggeographic, mapfs, map-fu,
mapgen, mapgrabber, mapi, mapi2pop3, mapiator, mapifier, mapify, mapip, mapipoz,
mapis, mapivi, mapix, mapkenzie, maple, maple3-itoc, maplens, mapleos, mapletree,
map-lib, maplincad, maplinx, maplist, mapmagick, mapmakerexpress, mapmanager,
mapmaster, mapmaudio, mapme, mapmvideo, mapmyglobe, mapnav, mapnzap, mapo,
mapobject, mapoelrooster, map-o-linux, mapomatix, maponto, maporlite, mapper,
mapper4j, mapperframework, mapphotogallery, mappingapi, mappingwidgets, mappit,
mapplet3d, mapplus-thin, mappo, map-pocket, mappoint4j, mapp-w, mappy,
mapquant, mapreader, maprec, mapreduce-cell, maprequest, maps, maps2winbugs,
mapscout, mapserver-nzeco, mapservice-dump, mapsnack, maps-n-dragons,
mapson, mapsplitter, mapspork, maps-schoolsys, mapstedi, mapster, mapstitch,
mapstorer, mapstudio, mapsurfer, maptales-mobile, maptoogremesh,
maptoolstokgen, mapuche, mapuched, mapwiki, mapwindowgis, mapwizard, mapx,
map-x, mapxor, mapyrus

Among them, some are empty, some are pretty basic or pretty old pieces of code, and some are very interesting. One of the latter is map-blog, a “Php dynamic web site with Maps Google Api to provide localisation. It is a blog, with your travel itinerary on a map. Each plot contains date, text, video, and picture. User navigates on the blog by clicking the plot on the map.“. It still seems pretty rough at the edges, but still, it’s nice to see that what we are working on here at MapMyGlobe could be of interest to some

For a while I’ve been wondering which one (if any) of these terms is proper english. The first two ones appeal to French speakers like I am (the French word being “Géolocalisation”), but it turns out they’re as far from Shakespeare’s language as it could get. On the other hand, the third one, Geolocation, is designated by Google, and therefore by the Wisdom of the Crowds, as the proper one

Here at MapMyGlobe, we use a tiny bit of IP geolocation (or more accurately, we’ll use it in the next release) to position a pin for the user when he creates his own profile page.

IP Geolocation is also a very important piece of my other project, MapMySearch, a mashup that enables you to locate on a map, the servers hosting the top results of your search in Google.

I was curious about how the quota counter on Gmail’s homepage (you know, the one before you log in, that’s updated every second) worked, so I had a quick look at the source, and it proved pretty interesting. First, it’s one of the few scripts I’ve seen from Google that’s not obfuscated. Then, it turns out they use linear interpolation between some past storage values and estimated future storage. The joke is that they have a storage estimate of Number.MAX_VALUE in Year 3456

A brilliant summary of how storage estimates evolved over time can be found on Zvi Devir’s page. He also points out the Sci-Fi inside joke comment in the interpolation array definition from the geeks over at Google: // Estimates of nanite storage generation over time. And finally, a function called updateQuota() is called every second to change the quota value on the webpage via DOM scripting.

Another interesting thing in this script is how they get a value of Round-trip Time (RTT) between your browser and their server and store it in a cookie for future use. They do that by loading an image of size 0, and by looking at the time span between when they start to send it and after they receive it. Well, strictly speaking, depending on your connection’s bandwidth this estimate can be higher because you have to send all the bytes in the request and get all the bytes in the response (when strictly speaking RTT is for one Bit) but I guess the estimate is good enough that way. In my case Gmail’s RTT varies greatly, from values as low as 172ms to as high as 3s. For reference, the code they use is:

var ONE_PX = "https://mail.google.com/mail/images/c.gif?t=" +
  (new Date()).getTime();

function LogRoundtripTime() {
  var img = new Image();
  var start = (new Date()).getTime();
  img.onload = GetRoundtripTimeFunction(start);
  img.src = ONE_PX;
}

function GetRoundtripTimeFunction(start) {
  return function() {
  var end = (new Date()).getTime();
  SetGmailCookie("GMAIL_RTT", (end - start));
  }
}

MapMyGlobe’s code is undergoing a lot of work these days. I will tell you more about it in the coming days, as I roll out the new functionalities and improvements. But what I can tell you now, is that I am feeling that I know very precisely what I need to change to make the app more efficient, more robust, and above all, simpler.

Stay tuned!

MapMyGlobe got a little bit too quiet lately, mainly because I’ve been very busy with school and then had to relax and enjoy my Christmas break… but I still think this project can turn into something nice.

That’s why I’m looking for a partner. I’m looking for somebody who likes the concept and who would like to advertise and to make some noise for it. My goal is not to make money out of it, but if one day the app attracts a reasonable amount of people it would definitely be nice and rewarding. If you’re interested let me know.

Moreover, I want to release the code as open-source. If you want to have a look at it shoot me an email at mapmyglobe @ gmail.com and I’ll send it your way. And if you improve it I’ll be glad to incorporate your changes into the site