Posted on Monday, 8th September 2008 by David Edgeworth
Ipoki rocks. It describes itself as a GPS-based social network, which means that with a suitable mobile phone and GPS receiver, you can broadcast your exact location to your friends, no matter where you are in the world. I have been using it for some time.
For a while I have thought, “Wouldn’t it be good if Ipoki integrated with Fire Eagle?” Then all my location-enabled social networks could pick up my location. Alternatively, I could update my location in Fire Eagle or another application that integrates with it, and my location could be picked up and shown on my Ipoki map. Well, it seems that the developers of Ipoki had the same idea, as Ipoki now integrates with Fire Eagle!
This adds to Ipoki’s already extensive integration capabilities. There is already a Facebook app, Qik, Twitter and Flickr integration, a blog badge, and the facility to download up to 10,000 location points and import them into Google Earth, or any other application that supports KML files. Now it can upload and download your data to and from Fire Eagle, it can connect to other location-aware social networks such as Rummble, ZKOUT, and Plazes.
So how does it all work? If you have a Windows Mobile, Symbian S60 or Blackberry phone (there’s no iPhone app as of yet), or a laptop with Windows XP or Vista, you download and install the relevant application from Ipoki. This will use your phone’s integrated GPS if it has one, or alternatively you can use a Bluetooth GPS receiver if it doesn’t. Your location is uploaded to Ipoki’s servers at an interval you specify. On the Ipoki website, or in your Ipoki Facebook app or your blog badge, this is shown on a Google map. I don’t have a Twitter account but I understand that your ‘tweets’ are displayed as a pop-up on your map. Your location is also uploaded to your Fire Eagle account and shared out amongst whatever Fire Eagle applications you have authorised. So all in all, it’s really well connected, which of course brings some privacy issues. Do you really want everyone to know exactly where you are every minute of the day?
The simple answer to this is no. Ipoki has plenty of privacy settings, so you can ‘go dark’ and remove your location if you need to. If you click the ‘hide location’ link, it will set your location to 0 degrees north, and 0 degrees west, which is actually a point in the North Atlantic Ocean just south of Ghana! Be aware that if you use this link, it will update your location to this point in Fire Eagle as well. You can also make your Ipoki account invisible to others, and you can turn off the public URL and IFrame embedding if you wish. Alternatively, if you don’t want everyone to know exactly where you are, but are happy giving an approximate location, you can just authorise Fire Eagle to talk to Ipoki at city or zipcode level. Then set your location in Fire Eagle. Ipoki will then place you in the vicinity of where you are.
I have found Ipoki particularly useful when travelling across the country to visit friends or relatives. I can give my URL to the people I am visiting, and they can track my progress down the motorway. Then they can see when I am about to arrive, and have the kettle on ready! A bit geeky, but fun.
The service is still in beta, but it works very well. I use it on my Nokia N95, and the only problem I’ve found is that it does not appear to work with just the A-GPS feature enabled; it tells me ‘GPS unavailable.’ If I want to use the internal GPS, I have to select the ‘integrated GPS’ option, which takes forever to get a fix. I reported this to the developers, who said they would log it as a bug. No new version has come out yet, though the code is open source so hopefully it will be sorted. But other than that, I find Ipoki really useful, and now it works with Fire Eagle, it’s well on the way to being a killer app.
Tags: GPS, Mobile, Social Networking
Posted in Mobile, Reviews, Social Networking, Software, Web | Comments (0)
