Mozilla has introduced an experimental Firefox browser add-on featuring powerful geolocation capabilities. Called Geode, the technology allows the location of Web surfers to be fixed and then maintained as users move about their hometowns, across the nation, or even when traveling around the world.
“You’ll be able to play with this in the upcoming beta releases of Firefox 3.1,” Geode’s developers said. “We realized, though, that some of our Firefox 3 users might also want to get a head start playing with geolocation today, and users can tell us what they think of the experience it provides.”
The Power of Location
Among other things, Geode will give Web sites the native ability to request — and Web surfers to optionally grant — access to the approximate position of the user’s computing device. This will enable search results to be ranked according to the user’s proximity to nearby stores, restaurants, theaters, parks and other local attractions.
However, Geode’s potential extends far beyond something as simple as a restaurant lookup, Mozilla noted. “Imagine a news site whose local section is, in fact, actually local, or Web site authentication that only allows you to log in from certain physical locations, like your house,” Geode’s developers said.
Geode’s enabling API, which is based on the W3C geolocation spec, defines a high-level interface to location information associated with the hosting device. In addition to accessing standard GPS signals, the technology also will be able to approximate the user’s location based on any available network signals, including Bluetooth, cellular IDs, Wi-Fi and even IP addresses.
For example, Mozilla is using Skyhook’s Loki technology to map locally available Wi-Fi signals to the user’s location. This enables Geode to almost instantly get a location fix with an accuracy of between 10 to 20 meters, regardless of whether the user is indoors or outside. By contrast, standard GPS-based methods can take more than 45 seconds to determine a location’s latitude and longitude.
Tracking Users
Geode also features the ability to track the locations of users on the go. For example, a tourist visiting London would be able to snap photos and write short notes at various locations in the city, and use a Web application to automatically tag each content item with the correct location data.
The Web application would then automatically upload the tourist’s content to a social-networking site such as Pownce, which would be able to use the available geolocation tags to construct links that point to a mapping service. As a result, the tourist’s friends and associates would be able to click on these links to see a satellite view of the area being toured.
To assuage user concerns about privacy, Mozilla notes that Geode users will be able to control just how much information they are willing to provide about their current location.
“With Geode, when a Web site requests your location, a notification bar will ask how much information you want to give that site — your exact location, your neighborhood, your city, or nothing at all,” developers said.
Geode also works in tandem with Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, which acts as a broker for the user’s last updated location — meaning that users will never have to manually enter their location again, developers said. The online service allows users to manage their privacy concerns in one convenient place, including the ability to choose which Web applications to trust and which to ignore.