Common Paradox Tech Blog

Google keeps adding new features to Google Maps and Google Earth. The latest: As of today you can type in a restaurant or other place you like in Google Maps and receive recommendations of nearby places you might like just as much or more.

Sure, it’s not quite as radical as something like the rumored store interior pics in Google Street View, but it’s always good to see more robust location services. Yelp offers something vaguely similar with a “people who viewed this also viewed” box, but Google’s algorithm is probably more sophisticated.

Google has beaten location-focused services like Foursquare to the punch with this. That’s too bad, because we imagine Foursquare could in theory use your check-in history to provide much better suggestions just like Netflix suggests films based on which movies you’ve already rented or streamed and how you’ve rated them. It’s not surprising that Google did it first, though; Google has a lot more experience using algorithms to determine what you’re looking for than Yelp or Foursquare do.

Google wasn’t very clear about how its algorithm works in its blog post on the subject. You’ll just have to try it for yourself to see if the results are helpful to you, but your mileage may vary.

We viewed the place page for the Indie Cafe sushi and Asian fusion restaurant on the far north side of Chicago and received a bunch of — you guessed it — sushi and Asian fusion restaurant suggestions in adjacent neighborhoods. But when we looked up Big City Swing dance studio in the same city, the results were a bit less precise. Some were great, like the Lincoln Tap Room and Tango Chicago. Others made a lot less sense, like a barber shop and other unrelated venues in a distant suburb almost an hour’s drive away.

Try it out and let us know what you think: How does it work? Do you think it’s helpful enough that you’ll be using it regularly?

Tags: foursquare, Google, google earth, Google Maps, location services, yelp

Did Apple reject Google Latitude from the App Store because they’re getting ready to launch a similar service of their own… that also uses a front-facing camera? Maybe, maybe not, but Patently Apple found this latest application, and 9to5mac seems to think it’s a possibility:

In Apple’s implementation, it looks like the location data [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Apple Considering Google Latitude-like Service for iPhone… with Front Facing Camera? — Patent Watch

Release date:

There’s an absolute eruption of activity around location-based services right now. Companies are getting funded left and right, new ones are popping up daily, and certain ones are seemingly starting to take off. But for a number of them, there’s a very big wall looming. And the more popular they get, the quicker they’ll reach it.

A few weeks ago, our own Jason Kincaid wrote a post about how Facebook is poised to take over the geolocation space. In it, he makes a number of good points, but there’s one that’s particularly interesting to me. “At most, there are probably a few dozen people who you’d like to share your location with,” he writes. Overall, that’s likely true to a varying degree depending on who you are, but it points to a larger problem I’m starting to notice with these location services: The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is. This is location’s social paradox.

In the last year alone, Sprint turned over users’ GPS data to authorities 8 million times. While that number is misleadingly high—this could translate to under a thousand individual users—it’s still terrifying. But wait, it gets even better!

There are convincing arguments to be made for law enforcement agencies’ access to location data, like in missing person cases, kidnappings or maybe fugitive situations. It just seems like it ought to be a little more mediated than this:

[At the Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception, Criminal Investigations and Intelligence Gathering conference] Sprint Nextel’s electronic surveillance manager Paul Taylor described an automated system that law enforcement could use to easily look up subscriber whereabouts.

They can submit a request for a particular user’s location up to every three minutes, for a period of 60 days, which accounts for the 8 million figure. What else does Sprint collect about you, for sharing?

Sprint keeps 24 months worth of URL history for some devices and that’s not even because of law enforcement. “It’s because marketing wants to rifle through the data,” [Taylor] said.

The marketing data retention sounds like the kind of thing you might unknowingly sign off on in some kind of unintelligible user agreement, and the location stuff could conceivably be used only in palatable ways (if you broadly consider warranted wiretapping palatable) but they’re both reminders that your telco—no, this isn’t just Sprint’s issue—knows a lot about you. Or, more to the point, that the average cellphone user has no idea how much data their wireless provider is collecting (or can collect) from them, and specifically, how it’s used.

Queasy yet? No worries! There’s a pharmacy two blocks to the west, and one block to the south. And they have your favorite pills. [PCWorld]

There’s a ton of buzz around location right now. Our discussion on it at the RealTime CrunchUp this past Friday easily could have gone on twice as long as it did. There are just so many interesting facets: Business models, privacy, real-life social implications, and so on. Not surprisingly, we’re seeing an explosion of services that are built around it. One such service was a TechCrunch50 demo pit company this year, OnTheRoad.

Started in 2004 in the Czech Republic to connect travelers, newer devices like smartphones with GPS are poised to take the service to the next level. While a lot of location services such Foursquare, Gowalla, and now Loopt are built around the idea of “checking-in” to venues, OnTheRoad takes a different approach. It’s more about creating a geotagged travel diary when you specifically go on a trip somewhere.

We already know well the dangers of Facebook: not only can it get you robbed, but it can land you in jail, whether thanks to careless profile updating at the scene of the crime or a bout of unwise poking.

Now it appears the upside is Facebook can keep you out of jail as well. Nineteen-year-old Rodney Bradford’s Facebook update at 11:49a.m. on October 17 was accepted as a suitable alibi after he was arrested in connection with a mugging in Brooklyn. The district attorney subpeonaed Facebook, who verified that the status update was created from a computer at the address of Mr. Bradford’s father in Harlem, where the accused indicated he had been at the time of the robbery.

After Facebook’s location confirmation, the charges against Bradford were dropped. Lawyer John Browning, who specializes in social networking and the law, said it is the first case he knows about where a Facebook update has served as alibi evidence.

Others are a bit more wary of the precedent being set. John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor Joseph Pollini notes, “With a username and password, anyone can input data in a Facebook page.” He says that teenagers are certainly savvy enough to set up an alibi ahead of time: “They watch television, the movies, there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”

With a plethora of location-based services coming online now it seems like we may run into similar cases even moreso in the future. What do you think, should Facebook updates be admissable evidence in court? Should location data on a social network be suitable evidence of alibi? Let us know in the comments.

[via CNet]

Image courtesy of davidsonscott15

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: alibi, facebook, law, lbs, legal, location services, robbery, status updates

Over at Sister-Site CrackBerry.com, Kevin is rocking the LiveBlog of the announcements from today’s developer conference right now. Why should you care? Well, it looks like RIM is hoping to close the gap on a few of the things they’re missing that webOS has (or will have) and are pushing ahead on other fronts. To wit:

• RIM Announces upcoming OpenGL support for the BlackBerry Platform. This is the big one and it will go a long way towards making the BB OS feel a little less stale when compared to other, more modern mobile operating systems. We’ve obviously been hoping for the same for webOS (perhaps in the form of WebGL).
• In conjunction with the above, RIM is also allowing themes into their App Store.
• RIM and Adobe, Sitting in a Tree. Palm won’t have exclusivity on Flash and Flash Apps, as RIM is beefing up their participation in the Open Screen Project.
• RIM Unveils New Services Platform for Developers. RIM made their name on push email, now they’re offering push, advertising, location services, and more to developers. It looks to be more robust than then announced-but-not-delivered Mojo Messaging Service for webOS, which offers push and location awareness.

We know that Palm is driving as quickly as a small company can to offer more services and support to developers – they did just announce in-browser development with Ares – but now that RIM seems to finally ‘get’ that they need to put some more glitz into the OS, Palm’s going to have to work double-time to stay in the game.

Palm and webOS fans: Nervous? Shrugging? What do you think?

Twitter is on the verge of rolling out its Geolocation API (actually, it’s already partially rolled out). That feature should be a boon to location-based services which can now send their location information back to Twitter and vice versa. But these locations will just be coordinates, it won’t be like Foursquare or Gowalla where you check in to actual places to tag your location. A new group aims to merge the ideas.

HashCeratops (yes, that’s really the name) is a group being led by Buzzd, the service that finds hot places in cities based on other location services. One main feed Buzzd looks to for its data is the Twitter stream. The problem is that without a standard for naming locations, it can be hard to parse tweets to find out exactly where people are. Hence, HashCeratops.

Brightkite has been one of the major players in the location-based social networking game for a while now. Originally a TechStars startup, the company was bought in April by Limbo, with the goal of merging the two location services. Since that time however, Brightkite has been flying a bit under the radar as a fresh crop of location-based services have popped up including the new early-adopter favorite, Foursquare. But now Brightkite looks ready to strike back at the competition with Brightkite 2.0.

It’s not entirely clear when Brightkite 2.0 will launch, but indications are that it will be soon. Users have been receiving notices about it. We’ve obtained a whole bunch of screenshots purported to be of the new version. We’ve reached out to the company to verify these, but they definitely look legitimate.