Where are you?

[yesthattom]

Holy shit! Google is now providing AJAX apps 2 free ways to (in a privacy-sensitive way) determine where the user is located. That means ticket sites, travel sites, etc. can now default to the right state/country, and mobile (cell phone) apps can (if your phone supports it) use the info too. Awesome.

If you want to test it, go to the Google 2008 US Election Gadget (http://www.google.com/2008election/) and see if it defaults to your state when you click “News by state”.

First, there’s the AJAX API property that provides a simple way to get an approximate, region-level estimate of a user’s location based on their IP address. It’s as simple as referencing google.loader.ClientLocation, which is made available using the Google AJAX API Loader. This API does not require users to install any client-side software.

...

Second, the Gears Geolocation API provides a way to get a more precise estimate of a user’s location. On mobile devices with Gears installed, the Geolocation API can use the cell-ID of nearby cell towers or on-board GPS (if either is available) to improve the postion fix. In the near future, we’ll be adding data from your WiFi connection to improve accuracy even further, on both desktop and mobile. In all cases, Gears takes care of assimilating the results from each source and returning the best available position estimate.

The Geolocation API has two JavaScript methods: getCurrentPosition() makes a single, one-off attempt to get a position fix, while watchPosition() watches the user’s position over time, and provides an update whenever the position changes.

Read all about it here.

Comments

[catwithbell.livejournal.com]

Defaulted to CA for me.

[lordlnyc.livejournal.com]

At work: it correctly defaulted to NY for me. However, it incorrectly defaulted to the John McCain tab and not Barack Obama's ;-)

[wordmad.livejournal.com]

Gee, I thought after watching "Numb3rs" all this time, that we could already do that.

Extended Google Geolocation API

[www-alrond-com.livejournal.com]

At the beginning, Google Geolocation API has determined the location for only Americans, for the other it has returned "unknown". Later this service was advanced, but it often does not show results even for developed countries as yet. For such cases, there is a simple javascript extension (http://www.wipmania.com/ru/blog/google-geolocation-api/) to the Google API, which gives back the country of user.