The Map Room

The announcement of Facebook Places frankly reminds me of the last rollout of location services by an Internet giant: Google Latitude.

1. The media freaks out about the privacy implications (see Lifehacker on how to disable the feature).
2. Hardly anyone can use the service because of national or technical limitations: Facebook Places is U.S.-only, and can only be used from the updated iPhone Facebook app or from their mobile-browser-optimized website (which requires a device with an HTML5 compatible browser and a GPS — so I can use it with my 3G iPad, if I were in the U.S.).
3. Of that subset of U.S. iPhone and HTML5-with-GPS users on Facebook, few will actively want to use it. (As with Latitude, the only people I’ve seen use it so far are people in the geospatial industry.)

The sort of people who have no qualms about sharing their location — who are eager to do so — are already using Gowalla, Foursquare and so forth; Facebook didn’t get to be Facebook by being dumb, so those services are integrated into Places.

From what I’ve been reading, the privacy critique of Facebook is essentially as follows:

1. It’s on by default.
2. By default, your friends can tag your location (which invites mischief and embarrassment).
3. Private locations (like someone’s home) can become public and can’t then be removed from the location database.

I’ve already got friends concerned about this, even though Places isn’t available in Canada yet. This isn’t the first time a move by Facebook has generated privacy worries, but this is precisely the sort of thing that can cripple the rollout of geolocation services. The benefits offered by this sort of thing — serendipitous meetups — aren’t important enough to outweigh those concerns for enough people.

Geolocation is apparently coming to Facebook next month. “The new location feature will have two aspects, according to the people familiar with Facebook’s plans. One will be a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends,” reports Nick Bilton. “The other will be a set of software tools, known as APIs, that outside developers can use to offer their own location-based services to Facebook users.” Via Gadling.

Two items from the world of location services:

• Google Latitude is now available for the iPhone, via the onboard web browser (which supports location services) rather than the maps application; it doesn’t run in the background, so it won’t update your location continuously.
• Peter is suspending development on whereyougonnabe for lack of investment funds.

To be honest, I haven’t been paying close attention to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle geolocation service, but since I reported on it a year ago it’s accumulated 70 applications that use it, integrating Fire Eagle location data with everything from Movable Type to the SPOT Satellite Messenger to whereyougonnabe (previously: 1, 2). But with Friends on Fire, their new Facebook application, their profile may well go up a bit. More here.

I have to say I like the approach of using a single service to update your location on many different devices and platforms; I’m just not sure that the case for broadcasting your location has been made yet.

• Facebook app whereyougonnabe? gets an upgrade focusing on integration with other platforms (previously).
• Diana Eid takes a look at map art, focusing on three artists we’ve seen before: Matthew Cusick, Elisabeth Lecourt and Susan Stockwell (via GeoCarta).
• On the Google Earth Blog, Frank has a roundup of innovative computer interfaces being used with Google Earth, which seems to be a favourite test-bed for such interfaces.
• NAVTEQ staff are blogging, but they haven’t quite figured out the difference between a blog and a blog entry (via AnyGeo).
• Strange Maps was profiled by Yahoo Picks last September, but alas, I was distracted by paying work at the time (via MapHist).
• Sean Gillies’s blog, formerly Import Cartography, gets a new name and address and a broader focus.
• U.S. court cases have rendered trap streets obsolete — you can’t copyright a fact — but here’s some more confirmation, if a bit redundant.
• A short excerpt from a deadly rough 1947 educational film on map projections (via Contours).

Yesterday, Peter Batty announced a new social-networking application that operates within Facebook: whereyougonnabe? In beta (naturally), this app lets you map your current and future activities and see what (and where) your friends are doing at the same time. The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The mapping applications for Facebook that appeared after the social-networking site opened up its API to developers generally sucked, in my opinion: they were rather lame user-plotted maps that didn’t do anything with data from your social network, which…  •  Continue reading this entry.