Case in point, i’m biking home late at night and find a 4 block perimeter around BAM surrounded by cops. Is there some kind of self indulgent awards show going on or did something awful happen that I should know about? The cops aren’t going to tell me, they’re all self important and coy. I ask Twitter by getting tweets referencing BAM within a 1 mile reference and immediately find out it’s the former. Tracy Morgan is hosting the hip hop honors. I move on.

Tonight, I hear explosions outside. We look out the window, fireworks in New York in the fall. What’s up? Again, I ask Twitter and find out the Manhattan bridge is 100 years old. Now I know why the fireworks are going off + I know a cool fact.

Before, what would I have done? Well I might have typed my keywords into Google news, but there’s lag there and a crazy amount of duplicate content from people cutting and pasting the AP news wire. Google news worked ok for big news stories but not much else. Or more recently I would have tried Google’s blog search, counting on reporters on the ground, but that was always tenuous at best. I’d rarely get the answer I was looking for and i’m a little unclear about Google’s indexing lag.

With Twitter I find out instantaneously what is going on. With so many people using Twitter my question is part of the minutia of someone else’s life. This is why Twitter works as a news source. When people ask ‘why would I care what some stranger had for breakfast?’ the reason one should care is aggregated and indexed, some stranger’s breakfast is some other stranger’s news source.

So here’s my new Firefox toolbar with Twitter search. From now on when I want to know what’s up, it’s up there in the right hand corner.

I’ve also wanted to use Twitter not only to find out ‘what was that explosion?’ but to also find out ‘what is the thing to do today?’ I don’t feel like those kinds of more open questions are as easy to answer, yet. There’s just too much noise and no clean way to segment the data to my preferences. Apps like foursquare are trying with their tips feature and that’s the right direction but there needs to be more there. Right now that kind of manual mining is too much overhead with very little reward. I’m sure it’s coming. For now i’m really excited about getting my news from Twitter. Out of all the social media noise, this is something that I find actually useful.

Thanks Carolina for the link!

“Each weekday during the course of Take your time: Olafur Eliasson, MoMA and P.S.1 lend selected visitors special cell-phone cameras to wear as necklaces. These devices take pictures at random intervals, documenting the visitors’ journeys through the exhibition in a candid and experiential way. Selected images from these visitor experiences later appear in the background of the online exhibition.” — from Take Your Time

Click here to view the more passively generated documentation made with WayMarkr technology!

Thanks for trying WY20!

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.

Introduction:

What’s Your 20? (WY20) leverages Fire Eagle and your mobile device to help you keep track of your location. By recording what are usually considered less interesting trips (a subway ride into the city as opposed to a flight to Florence), WY20 facilitates the mapping of your everyday travels. WY20 both lets you update your location via text message anytime you like and also periodically sends you a text reminder to update your location (just in case you don’t think your present location is that interesting and didn’t tell WY20 about it). Once you update your location via a text message, it becomes available to any other third party applications that use the Fire Eagle platform. Aggregate location data can be visualized to show one’s personal history.

Why did you write WY20?

I wanted to build a low tech way for people to keep track of, and remember that their daily location is important. We all have photos from our vacation but we do not document the more mundane trips. Those take up the bulk of our time and in reflection, may be the ones that are most interesting.

Fire Eagle is still in beta and the data from WY20 is currently only viewable on the Fire Eagle website. As Fire Eagle data gathered by WY20 is used by third party developers, data passed by WY20 to Fire Eagle will be used to show your current location as well as your travels over time in places such as Facebook, your blog and on your mobile device.

How do I use WY20?

It s easy! Just follow the user my20 on Twitter. Then just send my20 a twit (using the web or your phone) introducing yourself like so:

@my20 hey!

In a little while (Twitter can get overloaded), WY20 will respond with a Fire Eagle authentication URL. Click on this link and authenticate Fire Eagle against WY20. This step is necessary so that WY20 is allowed to update your location information.

What’s next?

That’s it, you re done! Anytime you want to update your location, just send a direct message to WY20 using Twitter’s shortcode (40404) and prefacing each message with d my20 (Twitter’s shorthand for sending a direct message to the user my20). For example:

d my20 Brooklyn, NY

Be as specific as you want about your present location. Texting ‘USA’ will work but so will ‘123 Main St Anytown,NY’ (if Anytown,NY was a real place). As long as Fire Eagle can resolve the address, it’ll be stored. What’s more, a few times a day, WY20 will remind you to update Fire Eagle with your present location.

If you don’t want to be bothered by WY20 at night, you can configure that within Twitter.

Is putting my location information on Twitter secure? I don’t want the whole world to know my location.

Yes. Your location is kept secure because all location self reporting is sent via direct message to WY20. Your location will NOT appear on your public timeline. It is stored within Fire Eagle where you have full control over which applications can and cannot see your location information.

What else?

More commands are coming but you can also tell WY20 to leave you alone
by texting stop. Like this:

d my20 stop

You’ll still be able to report your location but you won’t receive any
more text messages. To have WY20 send you messages again, just send a
start command.

d my20 start

Enjoy!

Clarification

What’s your 20 is something I learned from watching the wire.

What does “What’s your 20?” mean?

To answer that question you need to understand ten-codes. Ten-codes, or ten signals, are code words used to represent common phrases in voice communication, particularly in CB radio transmissions.

Ten-codes were developed in the 1940s at a time when police radio channels were limited in order to reduce use of speech on the radio. Historically, the codes have been widely used by law enforcement officers in North America.

Ten-codes were later adapted for use by CB radio enthusiasts before its pop culture explosion in the late 1970s. Remember the song Convoy by C.W. McCall in the mid-70s? How about the movie Smokey and the Bandit? Because of these pop-culture gems, phrases such as 10-4 for “understood” and what’s your twenty? for “where are you?” were forever embedded into the American lexicon.

“What’s your 20″ is a phrase meaning the same as the ten-code, 10-20. It is the same as asking “what’s your location” or “where are you?”.

— from http://whatsyour20.com/help/

My N95 comes with a whole host of features, some of which I won’t discover for another year. They are either really gimmicky or just don’t apply to me as they satisfy some edge case of a power user I am not familiar with. I can’t imagine using my phone to create a spreadsheet and the few times I have tried to open a PDF using the native viewer, it has thrown an error. But the N95 does come with an application that is not only cool on paper, but is actually incredibly usable — the radio app.

I no longer have to use a WAP browser, navigate around on a tiny screen for a ’streaming radio’ link on a webpage and hope that my phone can understand the stream’s MIME type. I just launch the radio application, browse radio stations by state and immerse myself in the soft sounds of my local NPR affiliate. If I get a phone call the radio fades out, then comes right back in when the call is over. Podcasts are great but I tend to run out and they require a certain level of management. This is real time, live content that I tap into constantly. Today it kept me company on laundry day.

Other things I am excited about: SenseCam being used for dementia patients (me and DelGaudio were doing the same thing with WayMarkr, not sure who the patients were), Ajax on Rails coming in the mail and Flickr having an uploader that isn’t terrible.

I was browsing the built in N-Series website on my N95, went under ‘applications’ and what do I find but WayMarkr! Very neat. Should probably get back to work on it.

Today I attended the Mobile Bar Camp NYC, a gathering of mobile developers and evangelists, to talk about the future of mobile and catch up. There was a similar event last spring but I missed it as I had just graduated and was rushing to get going on my road trip out to Redmond. I’ve been out of the mobile world, getting a taste of Rails and Flex, but it’s a matter of time before I get back into it so it was cool to come by and see where things are headed.

I’ve also been told that the dormant WayMarkr got a mention on the s60 applications blog.

The BarCamp was sponsored by Nokia in association with RG/A. Outside of all the tiny lettering on the Bar Camp tshirts and the plethora of N95 boxes, you wouldn’t know Nokia was involved. ITPers, especially my class (’07) practically took over the event with our own Andy Maskin helping to put the thing together. So yeah, good to see everyone and interesting to see Sean Owen talk about his work with semacode decoding software for Android.

And get this, I WON an N95 with my group during a half-bakery make up a compelling business plan from these keywords in 15 minutes competition. An N95! With the GPS, accelerometer, the works! I’ve got all my applications running on it and have managed to tether it as a bluetooth modem for my powerbook (it’s saying 3G!). Next i’m going to go outside and see how the GPS behaves. I’ve never had the pleasure of owning a device with integrated GPS, this is going to be awesome. I might have to start writing Python again.

Also, Andy froze a cell phone in a block of ice.