The Future of Location Based Services June 25
Location Based Services (LBS) and Local Search (show me pizza places near here) have been going to be the next big thing for some time now. Some attribute the failure of LBS to the ‘walled gardens’ that mobile phone networks operate within, a factor magnified within the UK by the comparitively high cost of data calls compared to the US.
Local Search has been a lot more successful (if you define success as numbers of users), in that I can search for the nearest cashpoint to my current location and usually find what I am looking for. Critics of Local Search suggest that it will ‘never take off’ because people know what is in their area and don’t need the Internet to tell them.
There is some sense in both of these standpoints. The high cost of data calls, does diminish the value of mobile LBS for the consumer. I do where the nearest cashpoint to my house is. A problem with LBS is complexity: it seems to be difficuilt to to provide a service that tells me what I want to know about where I am. This complexity goes hand-in-hand with the walled gardens of the mobile operators - its in the best interests of a service provider to make their customers think the job they are doing is incredibly difficuilt - it adds value to their service.
The LBS question - what is there that I want, near where I am - isn’t a particularly complex one. We talked about some of this stuff at Where Camp a few weeks ago, and a load of smart people thought of some complex solutions to the problem. The solution isn’t a complex one. I know loads about cash points here, and I am happy to tell someone who wants to know about cashpoints here everything I know, on the same terms that I am happy to give my knowledge to Wikipedia - that is I want to have certain privacy guarantees and I want to be opt in and out of the participation process.
So, we lots of geographically dispersed people who may be willing to share their local/specialist knowledge with each other. Why not have a Twitter group for ‘here’, which you make friends with if you know about here? If I want to know about here, I send a Twitter to here, saying - ‘where is there a good bar near here?’. Here isn’t a real person, its a bot (a computer program) that listens to incoming Twitters via the Twitter API. When it hears my Twitter, it sends it back out to each of its friends - people who know about here. Pretty simple.
With this in mind, I was excited to hear about Multimap’s new Twitter Bot. You can now query Multimap’s location data by sending a Twitter to their bot who talks to their own API and replies, for example:
d multimap nearest postoffice to reigate
reply:
direct from multimap: 1. Reigate, Bell Street, Reigate and Banstead, RH27BB
This is the most innovative thing to happen to LBS for quite some time. Its simple, cheap, effective and it works.
John McKerrell Jun 25
You’ll probably be interested to know that you can actually search some Open Street Map sourced data using the multimap twitter bot, there’s only a few POI categories available now but that will probably change in the future, take a look at my blog post about it here:
http://blog.johnmckerrell.com/2007/06/21/what-my-friends-did-at-hack-day/
SteveC Jun 25
Only problem is the address it’s given you is wrong, it’s not on Bell Street.
Jack DeNeut Nov 7
Inspired by the Multimap Twitter bot, I wrote a Twitter bot to query the local data I am collecting for Prague, Czech Republic ( http://twitter.com/okoli ). Works in about the same way as the Multimap bot, except that I allow for searching even when you don’t know your current address. For example, you can find fast food near the pub you’re sitting in at the moment by sending a message to bot in the form ‘fast food ? pub name’, rather than requiring a query like ‘fast food ? 123 oak street’. I built it this way for my own use - I often don’t know the address of the bar or restaurant I’m in at the moment.
Is the Multimap Twitter bot still working? I tried it a few days ago, and never got anything back.
Colm McMullan Nov 8
Hi Jack,
It is offline at the moment I’m afraid, I’m hoping to get time this weekend to fix it. Twitter seems to have been having general problems recently and I guess there’s a chance it’s related (I’m not getting twitters to my mobile for instance).
Colm
Colm McMullan Nov 12
It’s back online now - problem was that twitter changed the text format of their direct messages so the regular expressions broke
I’ll have to either keep a sharp eye on that or try to second guess what they might change to next…
Jack DeNeut Jan 11
Now that I’ve had a chance to run a Twitter bot for a few months, I’m encountering many of the same problems - hard to keep it up and running reliably. I used Twitter mainly for the free SMS functionality (a user can direct message my bot from Twitter SMS and get a response by SMS without my having to pay SMS fees), but I’d really prefer to get my own SMS number so I have more control over the process. But looking at the prices for outgoing SMSes to Europe, won’t be doing that any time soon.