I’ve just arrived back into the real world after spending 5 days at The Big Chill. A place where I no longer have to re-mortgage my flat to buy a bottle of wine, there isn’t a half hour queue to have a shower, and most importantly - mobile signal is bountiful.
Now, I’m very into location-based services (LBS) at the moment. They’re the hottest thing to incorporate into or base your entire social network around – but there are so many out there it makes my head spin.
After reading a very good overview of LBS’ by Jemima Kiss, I started wondering just how accurate -or even just usable - this technology had really become. To do this, I decided to road-test (cheat with) several services and play a game of Hide-and-Seek around the Big Chill campsite.
I prepped my friends with a list of those I’d be testing, and made sure they were all signed up and ready to go before we set out for the Chill. They would each go to a stage, update, and wait. The only rule was that if I managed to connect with one of their phones, they had to respond.
My early efforts though were initially thwarted – which unusually had nothing to do with my battery (round of applause Sony Ericsson S500i), or even the preciseness of the services themselves – but good old mobile signal. But, the Chill is in a valley – so I was prepared for that.
I could have bought a booster, but really wanted to try this without spending additional money, and using free services anyone can sign up to. If I were to go down the paid-for route, I would have signed up for mapAmobile, or downloaded the TomTom application for my phone. But that just felt a step too far…
Due to a frustrating lack of consistent signal, the GPS based guys had to be ticked off immediately (ZYB, Brightkite, Rummble etc). I would have loved to get my hands on Fire Eagle as well, but couldn’t get hold of a developer code in time.
Things really started moving when I checked Socialight, which I know is a favourite of a few of the group. No such luck there, but while I was frantically waving my phone about on a hill and looking generally insane, I thought I’d look at other services that use a ‘location update’ model. I bagged my first member of the group via a detailed update on Plazes, and my second after a quick look at WAYN (where are you now). As for Eventful, I couldn’t find a Big Chill listing, so my friends wouldn’t have been able to either.
But let’s not forget good old Twitter: one of my friends foolishly tweeted in sheer excitement about being ‘less than 5 metres from Annie Nightingale’. So I found her pretty swiftly, as her update came DIRECTLY to my phone.
I also had success by ‘blue jacking’ (perfect for when you don’t have any signal). This involves typing a message in the name field of a new contact – and then sending it to a mobile within range via Bluetooth.
Then I tried JotYou, a service that allows you to send a text with a specific delivery location and time attached. I had to do a bit of juggling, and go through Where.com, but the ‘area’ you can choose for it be delivered within is pretty large, and it was inevitable that it would be delivered to one of my group eventually.
After getting dangerously close to missing Roisin Murphy, I gave in and phoned my final lost friend to guess their location by the music playing in the background. And all in all, while I love the slick, sexiness of GPS tracking, I think it has a long way to come before you can use it at street – or grass – level.
The best way to track your movements for me is still some kind of update service, whether it’s a shout, a short message or a sticky note on a map – specifying your own location for others to find is still much more effective and reliable than anything else.