GeoWeb 2008 Conference – Infrastructure: Local to Global » Blog Archive

Where Are You Going To Be?

Google Maps Mania
July 30, 2008

As promised yesterday, here is the second part in our look at location based web applications. This two part post was inspired by Peter Batty’s presentation at the GeoWeb conference last week so it seems only fair to start with his own project whereyougonnabe.

whereyougonnabe
Whereyougonnabe is a Facebook application that helps you meet your friends more often. You tell whereyougonnabe where and when you will be doing things in the future and can see when your friends will be close to you.

It is a great tool for keeping up with what your friends are doing. You can view your location and your friends’ locations on Google Maps or Google Earth. Here’s a video with Peter explaining the service himself,

Dopplr
screen shot of Dopplr
Dopplr is one of the better known future location services. Dopplr lets you share your future travel plans with your friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidence, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Paris when you will be there too.

You can use Dopplr on your computer or your mobile phone and it links with on-line calendars and social networks so it easy to update your future locations.

Plazes
screenshot of plazes
Plazes was recently acquired by mobile phone company Nokia. Like the other future location services Plazes allows you to plot where you will be and see who will be crossing your path and what will be happening nearby.

One really nice feature of Plazes is Radar, which lets you explore an area on a Google Map and discover who is currently in that location and what places people have recommended.

TripIt
TripIt is a personal travel assistant that automatically organizes all your travel plans.

To build a travel itinerary you simply forward your travel confirmation emails to TripIt. TripIt then automatically combines your related travel bookings into a single master itinerary and searches the web for related information, including daily weather, Google Maps, driving directions, city guides and much more.

You are able to share your complete itinerary with friends or family who need to know your travel plans, or collaborate with fellow travellers on a trip. You can also create a network of TripIt Connections so you can view friend’s travel calendars and get alerted when your travel plans overlap with each other.

Placely
screen shot of Placely
Placely also lets you plan a travel itinerary. Once you have entered a planned trip Placely will give you a page with maps from Google, a five-day weather forecast and content from Yelp.com.

With Placely it is easy to share your itinerary with friends and colleagues and see if their travel plans overlap with yours. On a Google Map you can see how close your friends are to your location and you can synchronize schedules with your friends.

http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2008/07/where-are-you-going-to-be.html

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