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Seo Master present to you: By Charles Wiles, Product Manager, Google Mobile Team

I am thrilled to announce that today we have enhanced the Gears Geolocation API so that developers can now securely locate users to within 200m accuracy in major desktop browsers in hundreds of cities around the world. Whether your users are Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or (soon) Opera users, you can now automatically deliver an experience that is tailored to their current location. For example, lastminute.com's new Radar application allows users to find nearby hotels, ITN's Google Earth mash up in Firefox allows users to see nearby news stories and Rummble's social discovery site allows users to automatically set their current location for friends to see.



When we originally proposed the Gears Geolocation API our goal was to make it easy for developers to deliver location enabled web sites on mobile phones. However we realized laptop users would benefit from location enabled web sites too. Today we are adding WiFi signals to the Geolocation API so that laptop users can benefit from location enabled web sites for the first time and mobile users from the increased accuracy. And because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop and mobile browsers you can even use the same code on both platforms!

In Chrome and Android, with Gears built in, you can deliver a location enabled web site without requiring your users to install a plug-in, but in other browsers they will need to go through a simple plug-in install process. We also submitted a simplified version of the Geolocation API as a WC3 specification and the upcoming Firefox 3.1 plans to support the W3C version directly. The Gears Geolocation API is completely free to developers and users through the default Google location provider.

To protect user privacy, the Gears Geolocation API server does not record user location. However, third party sites may do so, and we recommend that users only allow web sites they trust to access their location. Gears will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time and the user can either allow or deny your site permission. We recommend users check the privacy policy of your web site if they are in doubt as to how your site may use location information.2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: This post is part of the Who's @ Google I/O, a series of blog posts that give a closer look at developers who'll be speaking or demoing at Google I/O. Today's post is a guest post written by Ken Hoetmer of Lonely Planet.

Lonely Planet has been using Google Geo APIs since 2006 - you can currently find them in use on destination profiles at lonelyplanet.com , in our trip planner application , in our hotel and hostel booking engine , on lonelyplanet.tv , and in our mobile site, m.lonelyplanet.com . I could talk for hours about any of these sites, but in preparation for Google I/O and my talk at the Maps APIs and Mobile session, I'll spend this post discussing our use of the Google Static Maps API and the HTTP geocoding service on m.lonelyplanet.com.

Our mobile site's primary feature is highlighting points of interest (POIs) around you, as selected by Lonely Planet. The site is browser based and targeted at a baseline of devices. This accessibility is great for on the road, but because of this choice, we can't obtain precise user locations via a location API. Instead, we've asked our users to self-select their location by entering it into a free form text field when they first arrive at the site. This location is then posted to our server, geocoded on the back end by forwarding the text to the Google HTTP geocoding API, and then used to either set the user's location or return a list of options for disambiguation.

Knowing the user's position, we then forward the position and a radius in kilometers to our Content API's POI proximity method, returning a list of points within range, in order of proximity. Once we have the POIs, we need to present them on a map, relative to the user's location. This is where the Google Static Maps API comes in. We can't rely on the availability of Flash, JavaScript, and Ajax, but the Static Maps API enables us to serve a JPEG map by simply providing our list of POI geocodes, a few bits about labeling markers, and a height / width (which we calculate per device by querying screen sizes from WURFL) as query parameters to a URL. Below the map we put a few links for switching the map between (road)map, satellite, hybrid, and terrain base maps.

That gives us a basic map, but what if the user wants to look a little farther to the north or east? To enable this, we augmented the map with a lightweight navigation bar (north, south, east, west, zoom in, zoom out), with links to new static maps that represent a pan or zoom action. Here's how we generated the links:

Let's say our page has a static map of width w pixels, height h pixels, centered at (lat,lng) and zoom level z.

$map_link = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?key={$key}&size={$w}x{$h}&center={$lat},{$lng}&zoom={$z}";

Then, we can generate north, south, east, and west links as follows (this example assumes the existence of a mercator projection class with standard xToLng, yToLat, latToY, lngToX routines):

// a mercator object
$mercator = new mercator();

// we'll pan 1/2 the map height / width in each go
 
// y pixel coordinate of center lat
$y = $mercator->latToY($lat);

// subtract (north) or add (south) half the height, then turn
 back into a latitude
$north = $mercator->yToLat($y - $h/2, $z);
$south = $mercator->yToLat($y + $h/2, $z);


// x pixel coordinate of center lng
$x = $mercator->lngToX($lng);

// subtract (west) or add (east) half the width, then turn back into a longitude
$east = $mercator->xToLng($x + $w/2, $z);
$west = $mercator->xToLng($x - $w/2, $z);

So that our north, south, east, west links are:

$north = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?key={$key}&size={$w}x{$h}&center={$north},{$lng}&zoom={$z}";
$south = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?key={$key}&size={$w}x{$h}&center={$south},{$lng}&zoom={$z}";
$east = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?key={$key}&size={$w}x{$h}&center={$lat},{$east}&zoom={$z}";
$west = "http://maps.google.com/staticmap?key={$key}&size={$w}x{$h}&center={$lat},{$west}&zoom={$z}";

Of course if you're serving a page knowing only a list of points and their geocodes, then you don't have a zoom level value for calculating the map links. Thankfully, mercator projection implementations often offer a 'getBoundsZoomLevel(bounds)' function, which serves this purpose (create your bounds by finding the minimum and maximum latitudes and longitudes of your list of geocodes). If your implementation doesn't provide this function, it's not complicated to write, but I'll leave that to the reader (hint: find difference in x and y values at various zoom levels and compare these to your map width and height).

As mentioned earlier, I'll be joining Susannah Raub and Aaron Jacobs to delve deeper into maps and mobile devices at Google I/O. In addition, Matthew Cashmore (Lonely Planet Ecosystems Manager) and I will be meeting developers and demoing our apps in the Developer Sandbox on Thursday, May 28. We'd love to meet you and we'll be easy to find - simply follow the noise to the jovial Welshman.

Guest Post by Ken Hoetmer, Lonely Planet2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: Location, location, location. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re really excited about all the ways location can make mobile apps and websites more useful. With Google Latitude, we created a simple way to share your location with whomever you like, display it wherever you like, and even keep a history of it if you want. We wanted to give you even more ways to use your location, so today we’re announcing the Google Latitude API -- an easy and safe way to build Latitude and location into any apps or features that you could possibly imagine!

Since launching Latitude, our team has been talking about all the cool things you could do with your continuously updated Latitude location. While we’ve built some of our ideas, there are simply too many exciting ones for us to do alone. Instead, we wanted to let developers create apps that do even more with Latitude and location. You could, for example, build apps or features for:

• Thermostats that turn on and off automatically when you’re driving towards or away from home.
• Traffic that send alerts if there’s heavy traffic ahead of you or on a route you usually take based on your location history.
• Your credit card accounts to alert you of potential fraud when a purchase is made far from where you actually are.
• Photo albums so your vacation photos appear on a map at all the places you visited based on your location history.

We want to help developers build all these applications and more, but our first priority is privacy and making sure we give users control over their location. That way, it’s only used when, where, and how users choose. When you request access to Latitude users’ data, users will have to specifically grant access to your domain after seeing exactly what data is being requested. You may request to update and view users’ best available location, view only their city-level location, and/or update and view their location history if they’ve opted in to using Google Location History. Users will also be able to revoke access from any developer at any time from their Google Account’s personal settings. Just like with Latitude, the user always chooses who can see their location.

We’ve also learned that making a phone’s continuous location available in the background is tricky to do accurately and efficiently -- just imagine your phone’s battery life if several apps were continuously getting your location in different ways. With this in mind, we wanted to build a free and open Latitude API that lets you just start using your users’ updated locations in new ways without reinventing the wheel.

To get started, go to http://code.google.com/apis/latitude to read our API documentation. Then, join the Latitude API Google Group to ask questions, discuss the API with the community, and give us feedback. The Latitude API is being launched in Labs so we can listen to developer feedback before it graduates. We’re excited to see what you can do with Latitude and location so please let us know what you think!

By Ana Ulin, Software Engineer, Google Mobile Team2013, By: Seo Master

Seo Master present to you: With recent launches like Google Latitude and Google Toolbar with My Location, it's clear we think location-based services are useful and fun! We also want developers everywhere to be able to use location to build cool new features and applications.

I'm pleased to announce that Google's Location Service (the same service which powers the My Location feature in many Google products), is now the default location provider in Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4. This means that developers can, with users' permission, gain access to their approximate location without requiring any additional plug-ins or setting configurations. It just works!

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4 uses the W3C geolocation API, a standard being adopted by many major browsers, so you won't have to branch code in the future.

For web developers, using geolocation services in Firefox is easy! Here's a simple example to get you started:

<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript">

function displayLocation(loc) {
  var locDiv = document.getElementById("locationDiv");
  locDiv.innerHTML = "lat: " + loc.coords.latitude + ", lon:" + loc.coords.longitude;
}

function getLocation() {
    navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(displayLocation);
}

</script>
</head>

<body>
<a href="#" onClick="getLocation()">Click here to display location</a><br>
<div id="locationDiv"></div>
</body>
</html>

When your site calls getCurrentPosition, a drop down will ask the user permission to get his or her location. Upon acceptance of the request, the callback function you specify will run with the machine's approximate location contained in the loc parameter. Here's a screenshot of the permission dropdown:


We hope you find the new and useful ways to use the new geolocation capabilities of Firefox!

By Jonathan McPhie, Google Mobile Team2013, By: Seo Master