The idea behind sharing codes is that a lot of people will want to share their location with friends and relatives who may not want to sign up to mapme.at, we recognise that and wanted to give you a way to share your location with some people while keeping your default public settings to something more restricted.

To get started log into mapme.at and click on the new “Sharing” tab at the top. You’ll be taken to a page that should look familiar, it shows you your current group accuracy settings but below you’ll also see the new “Sharing Codes” section:

It’s quite a big form but don’t worry, it’s quite simple really! The only thing you absolutely must enter is a description; this gives you a way of tracking what sharing codes you’ve created, whether it’s one for your parents, friends or perhaps even an employer, simply enter a description and save and you’ll get a new sharing code. We recommend that you create a new code for each person or purpose, that way if someone finds out one of your codes you can easily delete it and create a new one. The other fields let you specify how long the code is active for and the accuracy and amount of history to show, here’s a full breakdown off the sharing codes:

Sharing Code

This is the actual sharing code you’ll be giving out. Most people will simply want a link to the history page so that’s the link we give you, the sharing code can also be used with the API, more about that later.

Description

A short description so that you remember who you gave the code to.

Accuracy

The level of accuracy you want to show for this code. Standard options from “Country” to “Full Accuracy”, you can also set “No access” if you want to disable a code for a time.

History to show

Perhaps you’re happy for someone to see your current location but you don’t want them to be able to see everywhere you’ve ever been. This setting allows you to restrict how much of your history they can see.

Expires

If you want the sharing code to expire after a while enter a date and time in this setting. Various plain text times are accepted, once the code has been saved we’ll show you the accurate time we’ve determined. We won’t recalculate this until you edit the text. If you don’t enter anything for this then the sharing code will be active indefinitely.

Delete?

Want to delete a sharing code? Check this box and click “Save” below.

Remember that you must only share these codes with people you really want to see your location. If anyone else finds out a sharing code they will be able to see your location.

As mentioned above the sharing codes can be used with the API, simply pass sharing_code=[SHARINGCODE] and the API will your return your history to the level of accuracy you have specified. This is great for simpler applications where full OAuth access would be overkill. You can also use the sharing code with the export API but remember that if you put a sharing code on a webpage, even in the HTML, others will be able to read it and read your history, perhaps to a greater level of detail than you intended.

So play with the codes and let your family and friends find out where you are! As this is pretty fresh code there may be bugs so if you spot anything, let us know!

As part of this presentation we got in touch with the great people at ITO World. They’ve created some great graphics and visualisations in the past such as the OpenStreetMap Year of Edits image and video, and the OpenStreetMap response to Haiti earthquake video. Knowing that they can create some amazing work we asked them “What could you do with three years of personal location data?” In just a few weeks they came up with some really impressive visualisations.

All trips taken in the past 3 years from John McKerrell on Vimeo.

That image shows every single trip taken by John and stored in the mapme.at database. It shows all trips visible at once which is great on a global view but perhaps you’d like to see something a bit more close up, here’s every trip in London with all days shown at the same time:

All my travels in London run at once. from John McKerrell on Vimeo.

There’s more videos available, take a look at the slides on slideshare or on vimeo to see them.

We’ll be at the WhereCamp in Google’s offices in Mountain View this weekend. If you’re there say “Hi”, we’d love to discuss location tracking and visualisation with you.

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!

John McKerrell has blogged about a hardware hacking project he recently created mashing his location up with an old fashioned clock using an Arduino circuit board. The “Harry Potter” style Weasley clock has the names of favourites shown on the face of the clock and the hands of the clock move to point at his current location. Take a look at the video below or head over to his blog for more information.

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!

While location is very important and helps to convey meaning, it often isn’t enough on its own to illustrate your current situation. Saying that I’m “In San Francisco, California” might make it sound like I’m in holiday. If I added a label such as “where2008″ and a description of “Where 2008 Conference” that should hopefully make it clearer that I’m actually there on a business trip. Adding a few tags such as “maps, location, conference” should make sure that anyone who doesn’t know what “Where 2008 Conference” is now has a better idea.

So, on to the instructions. Before you can create a favourite you’ll need to set yourself up with an account. You can either follow the links on the front page or just click on this link to register your mapme.at account. If you’re all trendy and futuristic and setup with Open ID then you can go ahead and enter that, alternatively you can fill in the full form and password. You can attach an Open ID to your account later, and you can also add a password to an account later so don’t worry too much that the decision you make now will haunt you in the future. Either way you will still need to enter a username and your email address. The first so that people have a way of finding you on mapme.at and the second for important emails such as if you forget your login details or when someone adds you as a contact.

When you’ve filled the form in you should get an email that contains a link, we do this to confirm that you’ve entered your email address correctly as it’s going to be the only way you can get your password reset if you forget it. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to your user homepage. Initially this page should be centered somewhere near to you though for me it tends to be about 40 miles away. If you’re using a modern JavaScript enabled browser you should be able to drag the map somewhere close to the location you want then right click on the map and select “New favourite here”. Alternatively you can enter something in the search box in the top right and the map will re-center. Now just fill in the form on the right entering a label, a description and any tags you want then click “Create”. Your favourite should appear on the map and the information with some links will appear on the right hand side.

If you want to then “map” yourself at one of your favourites you can either click on the label on the right hand side, or visit mapme.at/label – if you’ve created a label for “home” or “work” one of the following should work – http://mapme.at/home or http://mapme.at/work

So now’s the time to go a little bit crazy and start creating favourites for some of the places you go most often. In later posts I’ll show more ways that you can use your list of favourite places to map your location when you’re out and about, there’s lots of ways now and more being created all the time. I’ll also show you how to make friends with people and how to see the history for people that you’ve already made friends with. For now though I’ll just leave you with a screengrab showing some of my favourites from the center of Liverpool:

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!