Notices

They haven't posted the Gadgets' code ...

... if they had, we could have run it on the tablet in a local web page to see what it calls.

Well, if nothing else, such a service might help those who attend the next summit more successfully meet up with Gnuite on museum night.

"They've just appeared on our long-range sensors, Captain!"

"Engage cloak! Raise Sheilds! Arm Weapons!"

...or maybe something like what Batman uses to find the Joker in Dark Knight...?

for gnu/linux on nokia devices it means:
they could have had this long ago but failed to put all the (existing and working) pieces together.

i did hope so, too. until nokia came up with "contacts on ovi" (formerly nokia chat). while this is a XMPP based service and could use the technology you describe to share locations, they chose to make this part proprietary (again). so chances are we'll see a feature like this in fremantle only as part of some ovi-service nobody'll use, but not the way we would want to.

remember, as somebody who does have friends who would like to share their locations, you need to choose now between:
nokia friend view
google latitude
contacts on ovi
any location-sharing XMPP-server
...and a few other services that exist as mainly web-based solutions

so when i'm on nokia friend view, my google latitude friends won't see me, neither will somebody with contacts on ovi.

in order to make location sharing happen, we need to have one standard that ensures interoperability. using a tablet and knowing about the power of openness, i'd say jabber-based location sharing is this standard. but of course nokia is much wiser...

The beauty of the built-in IM service, from my point of view anyway, is that it collates all my contacts, no matter what service they are using. It would be nice to have similar location information provision so that whichever service my friends are using, they can see where I am.

Anyway, we live in hope that the new location framework will provide some cool features, otherwise I'll have to pull my finger out and try to hook some of these bits together myself (or poke Nokians to open enough up to let us do so).

Now to be interfacink Google Latitude to orbital LART, one moment please, comrade.

what's interesting:

the media are still full of google latitude. there's a new story about it almost every day.

the two similar nokia services never had any media coverage at all. the only thing nokia gets mentioned for these days is extoring the finnish parliament.

maybe nokia should invite a few journalists to the sauna one day...

I wonder why it took so long till stuff like that came up again - my last network operator (3) offered a similar service in its portal in 2005...

And still I struggle to find a use case where Latitude or any other similar service would be worth it for me. Privacy concerns overrule the small convenience gain - I just don't want anybody to be able to track me constantly. If you want to know where I am, call me, and if I choose to ignore you, take the hint.

Haven't you heard? Google and Apple get media attention with every little tiny itsy-bitsy thing they do. Just check TechMeme - 97% of all the time, something concerning either Google or Apple gets the top spot, 2.9% of the time it's some Microsoft story, and the rest is split between the gazillion of other companies out there. There's little you can do to overcome the blogosphere's love for these two companies.

And both FriendView and Contacts on Ovi aren't meant to be advertised much anyway I'd think - they're beta services, and in FriendView's case, a Research Center product to study the impact/usage of such a service. For the enthusiasts only for now, so to speak...

thats the point:
these two companies understood how to get the PR they want.
the PR nokia gets meanwhile makes me want to hide away every nokia product i own when i'm on the train. (lex nokia, bochum, ...)

PR is a skill you can learn. nokia should try to learn.