see a puffin eat a fish

Link for Class

I posted this to the school list:

Subject: Test My Mobile App! (Sample: 721 broadway m : 11 west 53 st m)

I’m still working out my mobile application but one of the component
gives individuals walking and subway directions in manhattan and the
boroughs. If you need directions in the city, test my app out at the
same time!

The system will give you walking + subway directions in new york. Right
now it does _not_ ignore one ways so it may send you half a block out of
your way. It does takes into account weekend and rush hour subway
schedules. It will not know if the L train is on fire

Here’s how it works:

1) send a text to subway@txtst.com (txtst is 8-9-87-8, easy to type)

2) format your message like this:
[origin] [first letter of borough] : [destination] [first letter of borough]
(every borough is the first letter of the borough name except the bronx
which is bx)

For example, to get from school to the moma you would do:
721 broadway m : 11 west 53 st m

To get from my old apartment in brooklyn to school:
260 12th st b : 721 broadway m

Easy. You will get anywhere between one and three text messages back
depending on the length of the directions. I try to keep everything
down to one text but if I exceed the 140 character limit I split up the
messages.

Send me an email if you get the wrong directions and i’ll fix whatever
is wrong.

Thanks!

(Hostname not up, haven’t decided yet)

What it will do

This project will give users subway and walking directions through the city of New York. As individuals follow the given the directions, they will have the option of downloading and sharing (uploading) stories about the places they pass. An accompanying website will let users edit and share their stories as well as see a history of their paths through the city.

Where the data will come from

Writing my own stuff to find paths through the city. I have geocoded subway stops, the rest of the addresses will be translated with the yahoo geocoder.

Grammar

help@ [no args] -> user is send back a help page
subway@ [from : to] -> user is sent back subway directions from -> to if both can be geocoded. directions relative to time of day and day of week request sent. otherwise error i sent back. user is also sent back website login directions. See image below for borough codes.
walking@ [ from : to] -> see subway@
story@ [optional address] -> if address is sent, find a story close to that address. Otherwise send a story on the last requested parh.

tell@ [optional address] -> same as story@ except in the opposite direction. Rich content can be sent. User is sent back their login to the website.

Diagram

This diagram covers all the bases, not exhaustive for all paths. If the image is cut off, you can find it here.

I’ve been emailing back and forth with John Geraci who runs FoundCity. Last night I ran my idea of ‘path sharing’ by Matt and we brain stormed about how this thing could work and how it would be implemented. In creating a session over SMS a number of concerns need to be balanced including user overhead. If a user has to declare when a session starts and ends they may be discouraged from using the application. As we worked through what this thing does, we slowly realized that we could play fast and loose with the idea of a session. A session is just any new path and sessions never expire. You can always add to them and then use a web interface to clean them up later. For example, if you are backpacking across europe, it may take you months to finish your path. At the same time, you may want to create daily paths for the individual cities you visit.

I also figured out why FoundCity has distinct email addresses for different cities. I think it’s because translating an address to a geocode (lat/long) is a real pain because people enter their city/state combos differently. If you just accept an email address and the email address distinguishes the city, things are much easier. I think that may be too limiting for what I am trying to accomplish.

I had a great time with Matt, i’m really into this idea. We also need to come up with some sort of name for the site.

Here is also something I posted to the ubicommobile wiki:

I played around with FoundCity, an ITP thesis project which leverages geocoding and tagging.

FoundCity allows users to tag ‘finds’, things they deem of value, in their city and then share these finds with other users. A photo of the find is displayed on a map along with del.icio.us style end user tags of the find.

My interest in FoundCity is as a spring board for a geopsychology project. Mobile use is running parallel to the early days of the web. We started with individual transactions, “give me this web page” and slowly moved into the concept of sessions and batches of transactions that relate to each other over time and by order. For example, “you must login to post a message” involves multiple transactions that need to occur in a certain order.

I want to consider what would it mean to create sessions on a mobile phone using a lowest common denominator platform such as SMS. Foundcity shows me discreet finds related to an individual user and their tags but I am more interested in the path that was created between the finds. Paths must have a start, an order and an end. I’m thinking of building a SMS grammar which will allow users to record and potentially share their paths.

An email message I didn’t send Dennis because I answered my own question. I think Dodgeball does what I am describing.

—

Hi Dennis–

This is Mike from your ubicomp class. I wanted to bounce an idea off of you, let me know what you think. I want to see what I can do to create a ’session’ using SMS. This problem existed with the web. Initially the web was stateless and then people started asking, how do we authenticate people? How can we tell how long they were logged in? From this we got cookies and authentication schemes.

The same problem exists with SMS. Sending an SMS message is a one time transaction. Maybe it’s possible to create some semblance of a session with SMS, to create an intuitive, easy to use language that would allow a user to have a session, a start and end point that is longer than one transaction.

Here’s an example. Google maps is a one time transaction. You type in an address and it’s pinpointed on a map. There are other things you can do once you have zoomed in but that’s the main idea.

The Gmaps Pedometer (http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/) is an interactive mapping application. You give it a starting point and click every point along the way. When you’re done you have the total milage of your route. The application has a discrete start and end point as indicated by the ’start’ and ‘end’ record buttons.

As a completely hypothetical scenario, what if I wanted to build this application using SMS? You’d walk around the city and check in at different points. You’d have to have some kind of usable, coherent language for the start and end of the session. Start a new session, record a new point, backtrack my session, etc.

What do you think? Do you have an examples of anyone who has successfully pulled of a complicated command grammar using SMS? How complicated is dodgeball? Of all the commands you have, out of the hardcore users, do most people just use a couple of commands?