Remember last year when I wrote about how your iPhone tracks your location? (Sort of.) Some people find this stuff creepy, but I’m a fan of geo-tracking, and I want more of this data. It’s part of the reason I use things like Foursquare and Google Latitude. A fellow Milwaukee Makerspace member is even working on a device to seamlessly let your office mates know which office you are in. (See Marco.)
Last 30 days of tracking, via Google Latitude
The fact that Google Latitude only shows the last 30 days is (to me) a bug, not a feature, and it means that if I want to save that data, I probably need to dig into the API and write my own code to do it. I wrote some code to grab and save all my Foursquare data, and it worked great until they deprecated the API. I haven’t upgrade my code to use new API because it’s an OAuthMess, which I haven’t wanted to deal with yet.
A sad list of choices for hardcore geo-nerds
I understand that many (most?) people don’t want this data public, or shared, or kept, or all of those things. I mean, look at the options: Show timestamps, Export to KML, Delete history from this time period, Delete all history. Half of your choices involve deleting data.
When I look at some of the mapping crazy-geo stuff that Aaron has done… I’m floored by it, and I want to see more of that, not less. Again, it’s not for everyone, but for the people who want their own data, or the ability to share/republish their own data, there’s some good potential there… and I hope to see more of it in the future.