Building a New Web: Geolocation

February 18th, 2010 by Kurt Zenisek Categories: Internet Technology Tags: html 5, kurt zenisek, web site design, Website Design

In my past articles, I’ve mentioned how always-connected portable devices are changing the technological landscape. No area is being more influenced by this than geolocation. This concept was first introduced in GPS devices that could do no more than show where you currently are and hopefully help guide the way to where you’d like to go. The technology behind it is mostly unchanged, but now that the number of people with location-enabled devices is on the rise there are companies and communities exploring new uses for geolocation.

The iPhone has seen a surge of apps that allow you to “check-in” at any particular location. You can then decide to send out a message to your friends so they can come join you. The apps also keep track of each time you check into a location so they can integrate a game component into their service. They award “badges” to users that complete a certain objective such as, “Gym Rat” where you visit the gym over 10 times in 30 days. They also provide ranks for the top visitors of a certain location, and the highest attending visitor is commonly known as the “Mayor” of that location. These new services are a great idea considering they encourage meeting with friends, going out more frequently, and help promote / advertise your favorite businesses. The most popular services out there are Foursquare, Yelp, and Gowalla. Check them out, because they might provide an app for your phone even if it’s not an iPhone. Yelp is the latest to provide check-ins so it’s a little limited at the moment, but also provides the user-reviews that made the site so popular. These services are still very early on, and they’re providing a good amount of competition for each other.

Website designers are now able to integrate geolocation into websites as soon as the HTML5 standard gains a larger install base. This seems to be yet another feature that gained popularity through the iPhone’s App Store and is now being included as a capability of the new web. Developers will rejoice as they won’t have to make and maintain a separate app for every device out there, and instead built it into a website that every device can use.