MobyMap and location stuff you can expect soon

A map can help to tell your story.  Showing the geographical position of
your content can help make things more insightful and  fun, especially for
events, trips and groups

At MobyPicture, we’ve been working on integrating location information in
Moby for a while now.

The Geo-location capabilities of phones are getting better and better. The
user doesn¹t really care what kind of technology is being used. It can be
cell id, GPS, WiFI/IP-based positioning, as long as it doesn¹t eat up your
battery life.

How can you post location to Moby?
1. If you use the Moby iPhone Application, with each posting you can choose whether or not to also share your location.
2. If the EXIF data of your photo (this also works for video on the iPhone, but not on all phones) contains Geographic information, it’s also added as location on Moby.
3. Third party applications, like Gravity, Twibble and Twittelator also post the location using our API.

What does Moby do with the location of your postings?
1. Every posting which contains Geo information will show that location on a small map.

2. Based on the availability of the Geo information, we can distribute your posting to other services, like Brightkite for example. Soon, we¹re about to release a really nice new service regarding these possibilities (and Geo-fencing, which is explained below).
3. Search will also have features based on location. This means you’ll be able to find postings on a certain topic in a certain location/city.
4. We will introduce the MobyMap view within two weeks.

A nice example of what this will look like is the Lowlands MobyMap.

This view will be available for all users and groups! Similar to the list and grid view…

There is another cool thing we tested during the Lowlands Festival:

Geofencing

Based on a mask we can place over the map or a radius of XX metres around a certain long/lat and the time frame of an event, we automatically add all postings within that range and time in the event group. This means users don’t even need to bother hash tagging the postings or using the title/description to explain their friends where they are, they just need to Shoot n Share!