dale lane

Imagine you are in a town or city. Perhaps one which you are unfamiliar with.

You’ve arranged to meet someone, and want to help them find you.

They’re not a close friend or family member, so you don’t want to sign up with something like Google Latitude which feels like quite a long-term thing for people who want to always be able to see where you are.

You don’t want to have to ask them to sign up for some new service like Fire Eagle just to find you.

Maybe they’re a client coming to meet you for a meeting. You want to help them find you, but you’re not sure that you want them to be able to see where you go after the meeting, or what pub you go to that evening.

This is the sort of thing that “Fire Eagle Guest Pass” – my hack entry for Open Hack London 2009 – was written for.

I’ve put together a few pictures to explain what it does on slideshare. They’re not exactly fine art, but hopefully they explain the idea 🙂

I’ve tried to crowbar in a bunch of new tools into the hack – it was a chance to try:

Yahoo! BluePrint – to create the mobile web pages

Yahoo! Fire Eagle – a source of data for where people are

Yahoo! GeoPlanet – to understand where the user says they are

It was fun, and a good way to get to know the capabilities and limitations of the different tools available.

And although the hack is naturally a little rough around the edges, I think the main idea could be kinda useful.

Tags: blueprint, fire eagle, geolocation, hackday, location, mobile, openhack, openhacklondon, yahoo

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 7:02 am and is filed under code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.