Posts Tagged: yahoo

Journal — 3 Comments
31
Aug 10

Facebook Places; Haven’t We Been Here Before?

A week and a half ago Facebook finally launched their Places feature to a predictable media furore over location privacy, regardless of whether it’s justified or not and, to location industry watchers at least, a strong sense of deja vu. Haven’t we been here before?

Let’s look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Deja vu the first. According to Facebook, at the time of writing they have 500M users. But how many of them will actually use the service, regardless of whether they’ve updated their privacy settings?

Deja vu the second. So you decide you want to use Facebook Places? Only on an iPhone I’m afraid or from Facebook’s HTML5 mobile web site. Want an Android or Nokia app? You’re out of luck, for now. Want to use it outside the US? You’re even more out of luck, for now.

Facebook Places. The UK Version

Deja vu the third. So you decide you don’t want to use Facebook Places? It’s a location app so there’s bound to be privacy implications. Granted, Facebook have chosen to go down the opt-out route for location privacy, though you still have to physically use the service, but even the most cursory of web searches for “disable facebook places” yields loads of different takes on the same basic set of actions. Cult of Mac and ReadWriteWeb have great write ups, in non threatening, non technical language for how to ensure Facebook Places never sullies your Facebook stream.

Now take a step back, re-read the three points above and substitute, in order, Google’s Latitude, Foursquare’s, err, Foursquare and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle for Facebook Places. Granted the opt-out vs. opt-in approach to location sharing differs substantially (for Latitude, Foursquare and Fire Eagle it’s implicitly opt-in) but we’ve been here before. Many times. A new location sharing service is launched, people get worried due to media coverage and eventually the status quo is restored and everyone gets on with their lives as before, maybe with an additional bit of location richness added, maybe not. It’s worth bearing this in mind before you buy into the latest media coverage which over-uses the phrase “sparks privacy concerns“.

Update 1/9/10 – turns out I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. After I originally posted this, my daily trawl through my RSS feeds uncovered a post from Jonathan Crowe over at The Map Room blog that draws pretty much the same conclusions over Facebook Places as I do.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
Journal — 26 Comments
31
May 10

Locating The Next Role; The Yahoo! Years

Looking back at my career over the last 20 or so years, it’s immediately apparent that it’s always been a bit geo. Geophysical seismic survey processing for natural resources (OK, mostly for oil and gas) for Digicon … geo. Setting up operations for ERS-1, the European Space Agency’s first remote sensing synthetic aperture radar satellite … geo and rocket science. Short wave radio frequency planning to enable the BBC World Service to get transmissions into countries who would much prefer the BBC didn’t broadcast there … geo. Deploying the first geo-targeted ad system and rolling out a global place based view of the world internally and to the external developer community for Yahoo! … totally geo. Granted, there were other roles which had no geo context whatsoever but I always seem to keep coming back to this vague and nebulous mixture of place, location, maps and geography that we term geo.

this is who I am, who are you?

Some 4 years ago (actually 3 years and 10 months but let’s round up for the sake of convenience) I wasn’t really looking for a new role, but the opportunity arose to come and lead and engineering team for Yahoo! Now, four years later, it’s time to move onto another role, but more of that in a moment.

When I announced that I was leaving Yahoo! Geo I was taken aback at the reaction that it generated. Let’s rephrase that … I was taken aback, shocked, stunned and very deeply chuffed into the bargain. Techcrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about it under the brilliant headline Yahoo’s Director Of Geo Engineering Locates The Exit. Numerous friends, colleagues and geo-acquaintances offered congratulations and asked where next on Twitter, on Facebook, in blog posts and by the more old fashioned method of email. I didn’t expect any of this reaction, but it’s that reaction that, at least in part, prompted this blog post.

By the way, you shouldn’t believe everything you read in the media about working at Yahoo! It’s been an amazing experience and one I would willingly repeat if I had the opportunity to go back and do it all again. Before I joined Yahoo! I thought I had a pretty good handle on how the internet worked and how web applications and APIs worked. I didn’t but I did learn an awfully large amount from people do.

MacBook Pro and BlackBerry

Outside of the company, there’s also a popular misconception that there’s an uneasy cold war going on between Yahoo! and, in the geo space at least, their immediate competitors; Microsoft, Google, Mapquest and so on. True, there’s some major cultural differences between the organisations but there’s also much mutual respect for what each of our geo neighbours gets up to.

So how were the last 4 years? They went something like this …

The Highs

The Lows

  • People leaving the company as a result of the Microsoft bid; the unsuccessful Microsoft bid, something that never actually happened.
  • Reorganisations and new VPs; far too many of them. Six reorganisations in the space of twelve months and six VPs in the space of four years is too many by my reckoning and meant you spent more time rewriting your strategy than you do actually delivering and shipping product.
  • Teams that ship successful products in spite of the company not because of the company
  • Appearing on the once mighty ValleyWag as the result of a tweet about a wifi point called ‘valleywag’ at a Yahoo! All Hands meeting at the Sunnyvale based Yahoo! mothership.

I might have already mentioned the people at Yahoo! I met and worked with. Now would be a suitable point to mention them by name …

The Geo Technologies team, past and present: Bob Upham, Martin Barnes, Walter Andrag, Mike Dickson, Holger Dürer, Bob Craig, Roman Kirillov, Eddie Babcock, Samira Swarnkar, Rob Halliday, Rob Tyler, Chris Gent, Steve May, Ali Abtoy, Andrei Bychay, Chiho Kitahara

The YDN team: Sophie Davies-Patrick, Chris Heilmann, Anil Patel, Havi Hoffman & Stacy Millman

The Yahoo! alumni: Tyler Bell and Mark Law (ex Geo), Aaron Cope (ex Flickr), Tom Coates and Seth Fitzsimmonds (ex Brickhouse, Fire Eagle and Geo)

No Coffee Today

But now the Yahoo! years are behind me and after taking this week off to rest and do family stuff over the course of the UK Half Term school break I’ll be ready to join my new team and start to get to grips with my new role as Director of Ovi Places with Nokia.

Although it would be very tempting to think that my move to Nokia is in some way a result of the recently announced partnership between Yahoo! and Nokia that’s not the case. Nokia and I started the long conversation which ended with this blog post at the beginning on 2009; it took a while to get to this place.

So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.

Here’s looking forward to the rest of 2010; it could be geotastic.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
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28
May 10

Curiously Cartographic Creations #3 – The Special Relationship

Odd map of the London Underground? Check. Maps of how Swedes and Hungarians see Europe? Check. Ah … but what about how our neighbours across the Atlantic see the world? You know, the country that has a special relationship with the United Kingdom? I have just the very thing for you. Let’s start with a nice simplified version of the world.

The World according to America

He may no longer be Mr. President but apparently George. W. Bush had a curious grasp of the world’s geography.

The World According to Dubya

Keeping with the theme of President of the United States, this highly colourful view of the world comes from the mind of a Mr. Reagan. Allegedly.

The World According to Ronald Reagan

Photo Credits: irobot00 on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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27
May 10

Curiously Cartographic Creations #2 – Alternative Maps Of Europe

In the first of this occasional series, I looked at a curiously familiar but not quite right map of the London Underground evilly designed for tourists. In this second part of the series, it’s time to cast out gaze out across the English Channel to Europe and how two of the member states see the European Union.

First there’s how the Swedes see Europe; Britain is characterised by inventing soccer, inventing hooligans and beer (all three of which may be related) amongst others. The other European countries don’t fare much better.

Europe according to the Swedes

Heading South and slightly East is the self styled Chosen Nation of Hungary. While the descriptions are mostly one or two words, they’re not that flattering.  Britain is simply jobs, while other member states are characterised as tourist hordes, pizza, last minute hotels and beer land.

Europe according to the Hungarians

Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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27
May 10

Crystal Ball Gazing Part 2 – Eddy’s Sofa and The Nightmare of a Single Global Places Register

I recently contributed an article to the OpenGeoData, the blog and podcast on open maps, data and OpenStreetMap, a snippet of which is below.

“Eddies,” said Ford, “in the space-time continuum.” ”Ah,” nodded Arthur, “is he? Is he?”
“What?” said Ford. ”Er, who,” said Arthur, “is Eddy, then, exactly, then?”
…
Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”
“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”
“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.

Jump onto Eddy’s sofa for a moment and fast forward to a possible 2015.

After the location wars of 2010, the problems of mutually incompatible geographic identifiers have been solved with the formation of the Global Places Register. Founded by a fledgling startup on the outskirts of Bangalore, the GPR offered an open and free way for individuals and corporations to add their town, their business, their POI. All places added became part of the Global Places Translator, allowing Yahoo’s WOEIDs to be transformed into OpenStreetMap Ways, into long/lat centroids, into GeoNames ids or even, for the nostalgic, Eastings and Northings.

Sofa im Regen

… the rest of the article is on the OpenGeoData blog.

Photo Credits: Hell-G on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — 2 Comments
26
May 10

And In A Change To Our Scheduled Programming …

For a variety of reasons I’m sadly not going to be speaking at this year’s Telematics event in Detroit in a few week’s time and neither will I be at State of the Map.

The variety of reasons are both personal and based on my departure from Yahoo! at the end of this week and that the Telematics conference is coincident with my first week with [redacted]; I don’t yet have a clearly articulated story with regards to [redacted] and I don’t just want to retread the Yahoo! location and place story.

(untitled)

However I do plan to be speaking at the Location Business Summit USA in San Jose in September and in the same month I’ll be chairing the first w3gconf in the UK. All of which provides ample scope for a modicum of geotasticness.

Photo Credits: iwasacamera on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — 2 Comments
24
May 10

Crystal Ball Gazing Part 1 – The AGI Foresight Study

Way, way back in the deep dark past, Autumn 2009 to be precise, myself and several other people with an opinion on matters geo were asked to contribute a paper towards the Association for Geographic Information’s 2015 Foresight Study.

The geographic information industry is undergoing radical change. Stimulated by technology and social developments, the balance of power between existing and new players is shifting. Government policy is also undergoing transformation with the publication of the UK Location Strategy, INSPIRE, the Marine & Coastal Access Bill and a new business model for Ordnance Survey. The economic strictures under which the public and private sectors will need to operate, as the UK attempts to handle enormous public debt, are also certain to drive changes in market dynamics.

There can be little doubt that in 5 years the industry will look very different to how it does today.

As the industry association, the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) needs to be sure it can continue to deliver its central mission to serve and represent our current and future members through these changes. In order to do so, we need to better understand what these changes are likely to be and how they will impact the geospatial industry and its customers

Which is a nice way of saying that we were asked to look forward 5 years hence and try and predict how the UK geospatial industry would change. I had two issues with this.

Crystal Ball

Firstly, we don’t have a terribly good track record for predicting how the future of a given technology will turn out …

“There’s no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home” … Ken Olsen, founder and CEO of DEC in 1977

… and …

“I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers” …Thomas Watson of IBM in 1943 (apocryphal)

Secondly, I have a slight issue with the phrase geospatial industry which, to my mind at least, conjures up images of people dealing with maps and not the geo industry as a whole, although to be fair, I’m not precisely sure what the geo industry actually covers but it’s more than just maps.

Pin the Mustache on '70s Burt Reynolds - Instructions

So rather than not participating I chose to conveniently ignore the spatial specialisation an instead, attempt to play pin the tail on the (geo)donkey instead with the following paper submission:

AGI Foresight Study – Teaching Human Geography to the Internet (Gary Gale) Scribd Edit

Photo Credits: pasukaru76 and archiemcphee on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — 5 Comments
20
May 10

Latitude Inconsistitude

In the midst of yesterday’s I/O event, Google announced the launch of the long rumoured API for their Latitude location sharing platform; there’s ample coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb and on TechCrunch and that’s just fine because that’s not what I want to write about.

When it was launched in early 2009, Latitude was the receipt of some fairly harsh press from the informed tech media and from the uninformed traditional media and I argued for some latitude in the discussions on, err, Latitude.

Latitude kept on getting compared to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and the main gripes seemed to be:

  1. Latitude is a consumer application built into Google Maps, not a platform
  2. Latitude doesn’t have an API
  3. Latitide’s privacy model is opt-in but all or nothing

So now Latitude has an API and everyone’s happy. Right?

Unofficial Google Latitude T-Shirt

Wrong. The previous gripes have been done away with and replaced with three more gripes.

  1. Latitude needs to run in the background and so will either drain battery life or won’t run in the background on an iPhone at all.
  2. Latitude now has granular privacy controls but these are on the back-end so Google will know your location prior to federating it to location consumers via the API.
  3. Latitude needs a Google account to use.

There’s a lot of inconsistency here.

  1. Latitude, as part of Google Maps, already runs in the background on handsets that support that. The iPhone doesn’t, yet, but that’s an iPhone OS issue not a Latitude issue. Short battery life is a feature of almost all smartphone class handsets, Latitude or not.
  2. Latitude gains granular privacy controls but they’re on the back-end so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has granular privacy controls and they’re on the back-end but this has never been a source of complaint.
  3. Latitude needs a Google account to use. Correction. Latitude has always needed a Google account to use, so this is a bad thing. Fire Eagle has always needed a Yahoo! Id to use, and yet this is something not seen as a contentious issue.

One of the criticisms that was levelled at Fire Eagle was lack of a definitive consumer application at launch; a not unfair criticism. Latitude’s taken the inverse approach, launching with a consumer application and then opening up an API almost a year later.

Time will tell which of these two location sharing platforms will dominate or whether they will be usurped by another unseen contender.

Photo Credits: moleitau on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
Journal — 3 Comments
10
May 10

Your Place Is Not My Place; The Perils of Disambiguation

We take the art of geographic lookup for granted these days; type a place name into a form on a web site or feed it into a web service API and hey presto! Most of the time you’ll be told whether or not the place name is valid or not and, in case there’s more than one place with the same name, either asked to choose which one you mean or be presented with the most likely place.

Most of the time … but not all of the time.

Which Way To The Town Centre?

The hey presto bit of the process seems at first glance to be relatively trivial but isn’t. Just ask anyone who’s had to implement a system that handles place names. Actually, the hey presto part is actually two discreet processes in their own right. First of all we need to identify a place, or whether indeed there’s a place at all; this is usually called geoidentification.

identify; verb; establish or indicate who or what (someone or something) is

This is the thing that determines that there is a place in “I’m in London today” but not in “I do love Yorkshire Pudding“.

Once a place has been identified, we need to work out if there’s more than one place of the same name (which is more than likely as we’re stunningly unimaginative where place names are concerned, duplicating and reusing the same name all over the world) and if so, which one. This is usually called geodisambiguation.

disambiguate; verb; remove uncertainty of meaning from (and ambiguous sentence, phrase or other linguistic unit)

Some places are pretty easy to disambiguate; as far as I know there’s only one Ouagadougou and that’s the capital of Burkina Faso. Some places should be easy to disambiguate, least at first sight; take London, that should be easy. It’s the capital of the United Kingdom. Well that’s true but it could also be the London in Ontario, or the one in Arkansas, in California, in Kentucky or any of the other 22 Londons that I’m aware of.

The gentle art of disambiguation is critical to the act of geocoding, geoparsing, geotagging and any of the other words the the location industry chooses to tack geo on as a prefix. Get disambiguation wrong and you fail on two counts.

Firstly, you’re showing your audience that you don’t know or don’t care about what they’re trying to tell you. Secondly, you allow your users the opportunity to specify the same place in a multitude of conflicting ways.

This is part of the problem of GeoBabel; your place is not my place.

So far, so theoretical, but let’s look at a concrete example of this. A few weeks back I added my Twitter account to the Twitter directory site wefollow.com. The first thing you’re asked to do is to supply your location, or to “Type Your City” as wefollow.com phrases it. So I type London and the site starts to attempt to disambiguate on the fly; so do I mean “London, United Kingdom” or “London, Ontario“? But wait, what about the other options?

wefollow.com - London geo disambiguation fail #1

Which “London” is the one tagged by 436 people but with no indication of which country? What’s the difference between “London, United Kingdom“, “London,UK” and “London England“. Space and punctuation, or the lack of it, is obviously important to wefollow.com here. So let’s try and give the system some help and start to type United Kingdom …

wefollow.com - London geo disambiguation fail #2

Oh dear. The “London, United Kingdom” still shows up but because I’ve put a space in there I don’t get offered “London,UK” anymore but I do get offered the London in the lesser known country of “Uunited Kingdom” and also “London, Ub2“, which one assumes is the UB2 postal code which specifies the London suburb of Southall.

Your place is not my place.

To be fair, I’m not singling wefollow.com out for attack here; this is just one of many examples of sites who try to use geographic lookup but end up making life difficult for their users (but which London do I pick?) and for themselves (now, how many users in London in the UK do we have?). I’d happily offer to help them; if only I could find any contact information anywhere on the site …

Photo Credits: foilman on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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7
May 10

Geomob In A Coma

To paraphrase both Douglas Copland and The Smiths, Geomob, the highly successful mobile/geo/location/place fuelled meetup for geographers, both latent and professional is on hold. Possibly permanently. As Chris Osborne, the founder and organiser, said in an email to all members of the group:

After a wonderful couple of years doing geomob, and the people powered success that was WhereCampEU, I’m afraid to say that I am stepping down to make way for some new blood.

That does mean that there is an opportunity for one or more of you to step up and continue geomob in the spirit it started – free, non corporate, disrespectful and focused on people doing things.

Get in touch if you want to take on the mantle, until then geomob is on hiatus.

Its been a blast

As both Chris and I found out, organising the WhereCamp EU event that took place in London earlier this year was an exhausting, if ultimately rewarding, task. Imagine doing that every other month?

Chris Osborne at Geomob

I hope this isn’t the last we hear of Geomob; it’s been a major contributor to the Geo community in London and has, indeed, been a blast. It also gave me my very first Geo themed public speaking engagement and for that I’ll always be both profoundly grateful and profoundly embarrased at my first stumbling efforts.

If you’re thinking of taking up the role of Geomob organiser, I encourage you to do so; it’s a battering, weary, exhausting and sometimes thankless task in the run up to a meetup. Then you see the audience waiting expectantly , watch the speakers, listen to the Q&A session and before you know it the evening’s over in a rush; you won’t regret it.

Photo Credits: Roman Kirillov on Flickr.
Written and posted from the Yahoo! London office (51.5141985, -0.1292006)
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