see a puffin eat a fish

Check it:

I take a photo and my location is updated on my blog. This will really motivate me to take even more photos as I am getting a tangible added value from photo documentation.

This would be nice to have embedded in Facebook, as an iGoogle widget or possibly something much more lightweight that you could embed with javascript anywhere.

Also, unrelated — Jake at Local Projects has launched his City of Memory project, curated stories from the five boroughs. I had a small hand in this project a few years back, well worth checking out.

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/