My new project is out: http://geo.gy/
Were you ever in the middle of a conversation and needed to share your location with the other party? Geo.gy is a platform-independent, location shortener service. It uses HTML5 to detect your location, then gives you a short url to a pointer on a map. You can use Geo.gy to add location context to a post, tweet, SMS, anything you want decorated with location context.
Tweets are already geolocated, but location information is hard-coded into individual tweets and when a follower re-tweets your tweet, your location information is lost. Geo.gy allows you to share pointers to location with the same flexibility that imgur.com allows you to share pointers to pictures.
UPDATE: Geo.gy made to no.6 at Ycombinator hacker news!
2 Comments
Geo.gy is a great, simple idea. I could see using this a lot for posting/emailing/tweeting locations.
* It seems to return different short codes for the same location. Not sure why. I had assumed that the short code was a hash of the lat/long and not a database lookup.
* To be generally useful, it would be nice if you added Google geocoding of arbitrary locations instead of only “here I am” locations.
I look forward to how this evolves.
- S Jones
Developer
Chicago, IL
Hey, thanks for the comments.
Different platforms (with different capabilities), running different browsers give you different degrees of accuracy in the detected location. It can be as coarse as a reverse IP lookup (if everything else fails), or as accurate as a GPS point. In the latter case, two consecutive lookups at Geo.gy would give you two slightly different locations even if you have not moved at all. While I’m checking whether the exact same lat,lng pair has been posted before so that I give you back the same hash key, the slight change in your position will generate a new key. I will change this to group together pointers that are closeby under the same hash key. I just have not decided on the resolution yet.
Google already does that and I preferred to stick to things that are not available at the moment
cheers
Pol