There’s been some really interesting stuff coming out of Mozilla Labs lately. The latest toy is a plugin called Geode.
It’s based on the W3C editor’s draft geolocation API. In a nutshell, it allows you to provide your location to a website at the click of a button. You can try it for yourself on Pownce.
Now, I have no idea where it’s getting the location data from—probably a mixture of WiFi and network information a la Plazes—but I don’t need to know or care. What’s important is that it works. It works to such an extent that it’s close to being indistinguishable from magic. Sitting in the Clearleft office at 28 Kensington Street in Brighton, Geode updated my Pownce location as 9 Kensington Street in Brighton. That’s pretty damn close.
Little by little, we’re getting there:
I look forward to the day when geostamps are as ubiquitous as timestamps. If every image, every blog post, every video, every sound file had a longitude and latitude as well as a date and time… I can’t even begin to imagine the possibilities that would open up.