On 21 Apr 2010, at 16:01, Paul Hartman wrote:
...
I *believe* that a geolocation-aware browser would be able to tell
the site
where you are. So as soon as you open the webpage, the site will
query your
browser, your browser will tell it where you are and an AJAXy
element on the
page would say "Your nearest Tesco store is 13th Street... Click
here for
directions".
There are already big sites like Twitter and Google Maps that use the
geolocation API. Give it a try: http://www.google.com/maps/m
If it is able to get your location, it should have a little dot in the
bottom-right corner that will take you to your current location when
clicked.
Thanks!
That doesn't find my current location using my desktop Mac and Safari.
I CBA to try it with my current mobile phone which, although a "smart
phone", is an older model. I may get a flashy new Android unit soon,
so maybe I'll try it then.
What if the Google Street View vans, in addition to taking
photographs, were also scanning for wifi signals and recording their
location? That would give them an impressive database of wifi
"hotspots".
Indeed. I considered this when writing my previous response, but I
didn't know how interested readers would be. One could write quite a
lot on this subject.
Google (for instance) could get quite good data from this, but it
would be a lot of work. The locations of wifi access-points could be
triangulated quite accurately, but it's not really very clear how long
the data will stay accurate. There are probably hot-spots in town
centres and at fast-food restaurants which are static in the order of
5 years.
However once into residential areas, the SSIDs of APs may change quite
often, as residents move house or switch broadband providers. I'm not
sure about the US, but here in the UK (and I would imagine throughout
Europe) the majority of wifi access-points are supplied by ADSL and
cable ISPs. They like their customers to use their branded "BT
Homehub" (BT = British Telecom), or "Orange Livebox" in order to
reduce support overheads, and also because these are locked to their
DSL networks and thus help tie-in customers.
Nevertheless, customers typically change suppliers every 18 -24
months, just as soon as their contract expires and they see a new
"deal" from another ISP. So the SSID of Homehub1234, plotted 2 years
ago, may very well no longer be there. The widespread SSIDs of
"Linksys" and "Netgear" must be ignored, unless it is possible to
identify them by MAC address without authenticating.
Thus geolocation using wifi APs becomes quite a fraught problem, and
I'm not sure it's worth it, considering the how much more widespread
is use of mobile phones with GPS (or a cell-tower database).
Stroller.
