This past weekend saw the annual OpenStreetMap “State of the Map” conference arrive in Girona, Spain. I attended for the fourth year running and was glad to be given the opportunity to talk about mapme.at, what it is and how it uses OpenStreetMap data.

I started by giving a brief overview of the site, the functionality offered and how we integrate with many other services. I then went on to describe mapme.at as a “Social Location Experimentation Platform”. My idea behind this concept is that mapme.at gives people many ways to experiment with their location. On the one hand it allows regular users to experiment by trying out various services that become available. As an example, someone might decide to try Google Latitude out, perhaps as they’ve just got a new android phone. After a few weeks this person might decide that latitude isn’t offering what they want, perhaps they prefer the badges and mayorships of Foursquare. If they’ve signed up to mapme.at they can store all of their locations in our database where they will be available to the user to download or use in the future. In this way users can experiment without having to think “there’s no point trying this service out as I’ll just stop using it after a few weeks”.

The other type of experimentation is developers experimentation. Developers can use our API to experiment and produce all sorts of great apps. I mentioned the ferry trackers as an interesting example of putting data in, and then the “Weasley” clock as a fun example of pulling data out.

I also discussed some new functionality that we’re hoping to launch soon. Currently though we use OpenStreetMap as our canonical source of place data, there’s actually three sources that places might come from. If you’ve been using OpenStreetMap since before we launched the places functionality you may have added favourites for places you went to. Many of these favourites are public places that are now covered by the OpenStreetMap places. Part of the new functionality will allow you to merge your old favourites with the OpenStreetMap places meaning you’ll have a single set of logs all attached to the same place. If you’re using Foursquare you may have noticed that we do try to match their “venues” onto our places. Sometimes this isn’t possible though and if you’re using both mapme.at and Foursquare to check in you’ll sometimes find you’re logged at two separate places. The second part of the new functionality will allow you to manually match Foursquare venues onto our places so again you end up with all your logs attached to a single place. The result of this piece of functionality should be a big database of mappings between Foursquare venue IDs and mapme.at place IDs, and by extension OpenStreetMap IDs. We fully intend to release this data when it becomes available and we think this will be a good useful dataset for many people.

If the talk sounds interesting you can find my slides on slideshare or see them above. I believe all the talks were recorded too so videos should go live eventually. I’ll finish off by thanking the people who organised the conference. It really is one of the best conferences covering location and all things geo and they really did a good job of pulling everything together. The only thing left is to ask where will State of the Map 2011 be?!

We’ve still got some things to finish up to complete the support but right now you can go to your Sources page and link your account to Foursquare there. You have three options for how we’ll work with your Foursquare account. You can choose to let us pull your location from Foursquare which means that all your check ins get pulled into MapMe.At. Where possible we’ll match the Foursquare Venues onto our own places but where that’s not possible we’ll create an entry on our site to allow you to show people exactly where you are. You can also choose to make your “shouts” visible so people can see what you were doing when you checked in.

We will be adding support to push your locations from MapMe.At back into Foursquare soon so if that sounds good, just check the box when you link your account and we’ll start pushing locations over as soon as that’s ready. Again when we push locations into Foursquare we’ll try to match our places onto theirs where possible.

If you have any problems let us know over on Get Satisfaction or by mentioning our twitter account.

So, what does this mean? On Wednesday we pushed out an update to the site that gives you access to a huge database of places of interest. If you go to your homepage you’ll now see not just your favourites showing up but also other places from our database. These places will be listed on the left hand side under your favourites. They’re also displayed on the map as subtle little dots. Click on one of the places, either on the map or the text on the left to open up the place and map yourself there. You can also mark any of these places as a favourite by clicking on the star in the left hand side, optionally giving it a label, and clicking save. Don’t worry about your existing favourites, these have all been converted to private “places” and we’ve marked them as your favourites.

By default your homepage will centre on the last place that you mapped yourself to but if you’ve moved on from there you can either pan the map to your new location or use the search box on the top right. Remember that when searching more information is good, rather than just using “Market Street” something like “Market Street, San Francisco” is always going to give you better results.

If you have a browser that supports geolocation such as Firefox 3.6 or if you have Google Gears installed you should see a link marked “Find Me!” at the top right. If you click on that we’ll ask your browser where you are, it should ask for your permission and then we’ll move the map to where you are and show you some places nearby.

You might notice we’ve added a description of your current location to the top left of the map. This will remind you of where we think you are but you can also click on it if you want to bring the map back to your current location.

We source these places from OpenStreetMap, using the fine APIs provided by CloudMade. This gives us a constantly growing database of millions of places across the globe. Even so, nobody’s database is perfect so you might find that the place you’re at isn’t available. If this happens you can easily create a new place by clicking on the “Add Location” link on your homepage. If you mark the location as “Private” then nobody else will be able to map themselves there – you might like to use this for your home. If you share the location with your contacts then any contact that has full accuracy to view your location will be able to map themselves there. You can also share places with everyone, and if you do this we’ll even push these back into the OpenStreetMap database so everyone benefits!

With all this going on we’ve still found time to create a mobile tailored web page which is great to use on iPhone and Android devices, and should work fine on anything with a modern mobile browser. Go to http://mapme.at/me/mobile and you’ll be shown a description of your current location and a list of nearby places. If you click on the GPS link it will look-up your location from your phone’s GPS or location services (assuming your phone supports this) and update the nearby places. If you click the checkbox marked “Auto” then we will monitor your position and update the places as you move. When you see the correct place in the list just click on it to map yourself there. If you click the second checkbox we will even log your location continuously if we have a location accuracy of less than 50m. You can still map yourself at your favourite locations using labels like “mapme.at/home” and do “on the fly” searching using something like mapme.at/Constitution Hill, London – this is great for mobiles that don’t support JavaScript

If you’re using our API you’ll find that the methods relating to “favourites” will no longer work. Favourites as they used to work no longer exist on mapme.at. From now on everything will be about places. API methods are in place for accessing places right now though and can be used by simply replacing “favourite” with “place” in the URL.

So we really hope you enjoy the new functionality and find it useful. There’s more to come but please feed back to us any comments you have!

To use Google Latitude with mapme.at you’ll need to start by signing up for Latitude and enabling the Public Location Badge. On the page for the badge you should see a link entitled “Public JSON Feed”. Copy that address and then head over to your Location Sources page on mapme.at, scroll down the page until you find the Google Latitude section, enter the address in the box and you’re all set! Within a few minutes we’ll start requesting your location from Latitude.

Unfortunately, for mapme.at to be able to pull your exact location from Google Latitude and build up an accurate history, you will have to enable full public access to your location on Google Latitude (note that you can still hide your location in the standard ways on mapme.at). Obviously this is not ideal but until Google enable an authentication system or some better way of sharing your Latitude location, it’s all that we can offer to you.

One of the really good things about Google Latitude is that their mobile software already runs on so many phones. Already running on most Symbian S60 devices, Windows Mobile 5.0, colour BlackBerry devices and more, it’s quite likely that you’ll be able to run the software on your phone. The obvious omission of course is the iPhone but we already support InstaMapper’s GPS Tracker application and Thom Shannon’s novel email-base location tracking method for iPhone users so that shouldn’t be much of an issue.

Dan Karran has written an integration module for the Activity Stream module of Drupal. If you take a look at the blog post you should be able to get this module installed and tell people where you are.

The other method to share your location is with the new “Export” feature of our API. To use this you just need to add an iframe to your page linking through to the new page with a URL such as http://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=thebox. You can pass one or more usernames as you see fit (separated by commas), you can also pass arguments to specify the time and date that you want to show locations from, using similar arguments to the API ‘where’ method. Here’s a page showing history for “The Box” from the BBC over the past 3 months:

http://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=thebox&mode=since&since=3%20months%20ago

If you only pass usernames in then the page will show the current location of the user and as already mentioned you can also link to multiple users. Here’s the map showing the current location of the ferries on the River Mersey in Liverpool, GB:

http://mapme.at/api/export.html?usernames=royaldaffodil,royaliris,snowdrop

The export method uses the same security precautions as the rest of the site so if you want to use it to show your location to members of the public you may need to change your location sharing preferences, as always only expose as much information as you feel comfortable with. There’s more information about this on the documentation page for the export method so take a look there and then try it out!

We’re glad to announce that we’ve just released a code change which allows you to enter a user profile onto mapme.at. Go to the Account page and you can add a short description of yourself, a link to your website and even upload a picture of yourself. We recommend doing this as it will add real life to your history page. We’ve even made it easy for you by adding the ability to pull your existing profile information across from twitter.

At the same time we’ve also modified the history page so that you can see the list of contacts for the person who’s history you’re looking at. This should make it really easy for you to build up your list of contacts by seeing who your friends are in contact with and adding them yourself.

If you’re updating your profile please remember that everything you put in there will be visible to anyone, even people who have not signed up to mapme.at or made contact with you, only enter information you’re happy for everyone to see.

So head over to your account page now and get uploading or importing. Let’s banish the orange question marks as soon as possible!

Great New Look and Feel

For our new design we enlisted the help of the great team at Cogniance. They worked with us to provide a new logo and overall look and feel. They also gave us some ideas for improvements to the user experience; many of these have been implemented already but some are still on the list to be completed soon. We’re really happy about how the new look has turned out, the bright colours really inject life into the site and the fact that we’ve been able to tie these in with the map is just amazing, more on that in a moment…

CloudMade Integration

So far we’re taking advantage of just a few of the great services that CloudMade provide. In the previous section I mentioned the fact that we have been able to link our colourscheme into the colours used in the map. This is possible due to the groundbreaking new “Style Editor” tool from CloudMade. With this you can edit the styles used in the map to your heart’s content. Our map style was based on one that CloudMade call “The Original”, this looks really nice and only required us to spend a short time playing with the style editor to get it coordinating with our colours.

We’re also using the Geocoding services that CloudMade provide. Geocoding is the process by which a computer takes a written address, such as “10 Downing Street, London” and converts it to a latitude and longitude. We use this service on the homepage to make it easier for you to find your current location and create favourites, and with the twitter integration when you’re out and about. We’re really happy with the results we’re seeing from this service and we know that CloudMade are working hard to make it even better.

By using the unique OpenStreetMap dataset CloudMade are able to provide some really good services giving us access to the data at a very low level. We’ve got some ideas for how we can more closely integrate them into the services we provide on mapme.at and you should see these developing over the coming months.

You may notice that OpenStreetMap and therefore CloudMade do not have street level coverage worldwide. It’s actually the case that no mapping provider currently has coverage throughout the world and, similar in some ways to those providers, OpenStreetMap has some areas with better coverage than others. The one big difference is that if you find that the coverage around the locations that you visit often is lacking, you can get involved with improving this. We at mapme.at are big fans of the OpenStreetMap project and have been contributing for a number of years. We whole-heartedly recommend that you get involved, you might want to try signing up to their mailing lists or just take a look through their “wiki” to find out how to get involved.

New OAuth Developer API

At mapme.at we’ve always tried to make it as easy as possible for you to update your location. We already provide integration with Twitter and with FireEagle. You can update your location through the web, via email or even using DNS. So far though all of these integrations have required us to do most of the work on our side, meaning that you couldn’t use a new method, such as a new mobile app, until we had done some work integrating it. We are now opening up an API (Application Programming Interface) so that any developer can sign up and integrate their application with the mapme.at site.

An API is essentially a set of instructions and methods that we give to developers that tell them how to access our website and update the data that we store here. Obviously it wouldn’t be very good if just anybody could access all the data we store, or change everybody’s data so to stop that we use authentication. We’ve decided to use the OAuth authentication scheme to make sure that we take the best possible care with your data, while allowing you to make the most of third party services that will enrich your experience of mapme.at. OAuth allows you to give permission to a third party service to access or update your data on mapme.at without you needing to give them your username and password. This means that if at some point in the future you decide that you don’t want this service having access to your data, you can simply revoke that access from our website. If, for instance, you gave a mobile app on your phone access to your data, and then lost your phone, you could still revoke the access even though you can’t use your phone.

If you’re interested in trying this out then you can find the documentation about our API here. We’re just starting out with this so we’re declaring that our API is currently in “beta” mode. This means that we’re still working on it and the way it works is likely to change in the future, we’ll try to keep you informed in advance of any major changes though. We’ll also be working to extend the documentation further to cover more aspects of the API.

one more thing… iPhone!

The final thing that we mentioned in the talk at CloudMade is that we’re currently working on a native iPhone app to really simplify use of the mapme.at services on the iPhone. It will use our custom map tiles so will look really good, and will allow you to update your location, see which of your contacts are nearby and continously track your location. It’s still going to be a few more weeks before it’s ready but as soon as it is, we’ll let you know!

As you can tell there’s been a lot happening recently with the mapme.at site. The development doesn’t end here though so we’ll be continuing to add new features over the coming months. We’ll also be extending the documentation not just for the new developer API but also the documentation for the site in general. Finally we’ll try to keep you more in the loop by keeping this blog active, so sign up with your favourite RSS reader to make sure you hear it about it straight away!

I find this a very interesting story to follow. Though The Box travels quite slowly, and therefore is not something to follow on a minute-by-minute basis, it will end up travelling long distances and should create a thorough map of the busiest shipping lanes and ports throughout the world. As such it’s certainly something I will be keeping an eye on. I thought it might be useful to have an Atom feed with GeoRSS to make it possible to follow the path of The Box without having to remember to check the site. I was also quite interested in creating a user account for The Box, pulling the location of it into mapme.at and allowing users to follow the location on this site. Fortunately I can now announce that both these things are now possible.

I’ve put together a basic script that pulls down the location of The Box every half hour and places this into the mapme.at database. The username is “thebox” so you can see its current location at http://mapme.at/where/thebox. I’ve set the permissions on the account so that anyone and everyone can view its location, but if you add it as a contact then it will show up on your homepage if you ever happen to be nearby.

You can also follow the path of The Box by using a new feature of the site. The following URL will return an Atom feed for the user “thebox” for all logged locations since midday “yesterday”:

http://mapme.at/api/where.atom?username=thebox&since=yesterday&mode=since

This next URL will give all logged locations since The Box was launched on the 8th September:

http://mapme.at/api/where.atom?username=thebox&since=2008-09-08+00:00:00&mode=since

If you use this in a standard RSS reader such as Google Reader or Thunderbird you’ll find an entry for each location that the box has been to, a small map of the area and a link to the history page for that day. If you load the RSS file into something that can read GeoRSS you’ll see a map highlighting all of the places it’s been to, for instance here’s the link loaded into Google Maps. Loading it in a standard RSS reader is a good way to be kept up to date about when The Box moves without having to look yourself.

As you might have guessed, you can also use this URL to track your contacts, though at the moment you will only be able to do this if their location is open to the public. More features along these lines should be coming soon!

How about another scenario, a few months ago I twittered:

Just rowed many miles down river. Barbecue now then bit more rowing to the beach.

If you know I live in Liverpool you might find that message a bit odd, have I really been rowing down the River Mersey?? In fact on that day I was halfway through a holiday to southern Turkey and we’d spent the day rowing down the Xanthos River. Being able to know my location when reading my past (or even current) twitters could obviously be useful.

Finally, here’s a snap taken when I was visiting San Francisco in May:

Me and the Golden Gate Bridge

Most people probably know that the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco, but not everyone is going to know that it’s on the South West coast of the United States. Being able to find out where I was when I took a photo is a great way of making it more interesting.

So there you have it, location is important. Being able to find out where people are now is important, being able to find out where people have been is also important. Why am I telling you this? Well this is what mapme.at is all about. I’ve been tracking my location in various ways for 2 years now. Up to a year ago I was finding it difficult to track myself as much as I would like. I setup mapme.at to try to make things easier, before mapme.at I had a single method that required me to have GPS coverage and to run a Java app on my phone. The original version of the site took this up to three separate ways of logging where I am. There are now 8 ways to log my location on mapme.at and considering one of those methods is Fire Eagle there’s potential for many more. Over the coming days I’ll be writing a few more posts to try to cover all of the ways that you can update your location here, if you’re interested in trying it out head over here for the first of these posts!