Update: What’s you 20?
WY20 has only been around for 24 hours and i’ve already gotten a bunch of feedback on the application. Thanks so much! Outside of all the bugs everyone has found (the current list is all fixed, send me more) i’ve noticed some emerging behaviors and misunderstandings regarding how to use WY20.
First, how to sign up. Send a tweet (not a direct message) that says @my20 hi. MY20 will in turn find this tweet and send you an authentication URL to FireEagle. This is a little confusing but is necessary due to how Twitter works, how the API is set up and direct limitations imposed on the API for developers so they do not throttle Twitter.
Once you are authenticated with WY20 and Fire Eagle, you can report your location by sending a direct message to WY20 (d my20 boston,ma). You must be following my20 on Twitter. Only direct messages are supported because I do not want to clutter your public Twitter timeline with location information and I want to keep your location information private. If these messages were made public, WY20 would defeat the whole purpose of Fire Eagle — to let you control who sees your location information.
Next, the value of WY20 is not clear because Fire Eagle is in its infancy. I am facilitating the collection of location information but until Fire Eagle’s application gallery is opened up, there are very few interesting ways of sharing and looking at that location information. I will personally be working on some of these applications.
Finally, there is some confusion regarding what location means. In Fire Eagle’s world, location is anything that can be geocoded. So ‘boston,ma’ or ‘11201′ work, but ‘office’ will not. Also ‘going to my office in boston,ma’ will not work. I’d like to stay away from having a regexp party. If WY20 becomes popular, I would be open to building in a translation mechanism so the application knows that when you tell me you’re at ‘office’ you are at ‘432 Broadway ny,ny’.
Thanks again for all the great feedback.
