Joining Up My Web Spaces 2

This is a follow on to my earlier item Joining up my web spacesI have added more update mechanisms and Plaxo to my network.

LinkedIn is so out in the cold when it comes to linking to other social networking applications that I have been struggling to find anything that will update my status in LinkedIn.  At last I have discovered Ping.fmWith one entry it can update all your sites or just those set for status, microblog or blog updates. I have set Twitter and LinkedIn as status updates so that I can post a status entry in Ping.fm and it will update Twitter and LinkedIn. Then of course Twitter updates the rest.

My WordPress blog already shows my Twitter feed but I wanted new blog posts to automatically create a Twitter entry.  So I have now set up Twitterfeedto create a Twitter entry by taking the title of my new blog entry and the link to the blog entry.  It needs to use Feedburner to access my blog and it can create a short URL using TinyURLOnce set up, it does all this automatically.

Mu updated diagram now looks like this:

My Soical Net 2

 

My Location Aware Mobile Phone

You can do a lot on your mobile phones these days.  Quite a few mobiles now have GPS to determine your location but even if you haven’t got GPS then your location can be determined .  My device is a Vodafone v1615 which is a rebadged HTC TyTN II (aka Kaiser).  It runs Windows Mobile 6 PPC version and has GPS and Wifi built in.  So as you can imagne I have been experimenting with some of the free software that is location aware. 

These location aware phones can determine your location either through the GPS on your phone, via Mobile phone mast triangulation or from your wifi IP address.   Google Gears has made establishing our location easier whether we have GPS or not. A number of sites are now Google Gears enabled.  

Yahoo has also added a new dimension by recently launching FireEagle which allows your location to be shared with other applications.  This way you only need run one location aware application on your phone and as along as it can share it’s location with FireEagle your other location aware applications can read your location. 

We can use sites like Google maps, Microsoft LiveSearch and Yahoo Go! on our mobiles to find what services and retail outlets are available in our area. Of the three I prefer Google Maps for all the extras you get such as being able to enter the name of a point of interest and not only do you get its location (full address and contact details) but reviews,  photos & videos, user content, links to its web page and its entry in wikipedia.  The one thing missing from Google maps is traffic news in the UK (its available in the US).  The one I use for traffic is  Map 24 which is another download but it does give good traffic plus the usual what’s in the area.

I have been looking for a simple ‘show my location’ piece of software, nothing complicated just my location. Loki would be a great example of a simple clean effective tool to show your location but at the moment it only uses WiFi to determine your location no sign of it using Google Gears.  Loki links to FireEagle but doesn’t allow you to read your location from FireEagle it only allows your Loki location to be sent to FireEagle. 

SeeMyWhere looks to be more like it as it can use GPS or Xtify to determine your location.  However it is only available on Blackberry at the moment.  It doesn’t share its location through FireEagle and I am reluctant to load yet another add-in (Xtify) to determine my location when I’m already running GoogleGears.

So I am currently using Rummble which is much more than just a location revealer.  It of course uses Google Gears and can share and read locations through FireEagle. It has a status update , you can announce a future trip (see Dopplr below) and you can write a travel blog.   It’s main purpose seems to be to Rummble (share your rating of) a place you have visited. And you can see Rummbles about places in your vicinity. 

Like a lot of other Social Networking software Rummble can interlink with other Social Networking software.  I have mine set to update my status and location on Twitter which in turn updates my Facebook status – see my earlier blog joining up my web spaces.  It can be set to show your Rummbles on a map in Facebook which I haven’t set yet. 

It also allows you to share your photos or to pull in your Flickr photos.  That reminds me that if your phone has a camera as well as GPS you can geo tag your photos and display them on a map on Flickr and  Picassa or add them to Google Earth. See my earlier blog on discovering the joys of geotagging

Rummble like Dopplr allows us to announce future trips that will trigger people we know or are linked to in the vicinity of our trip.  Rummble adds the ability to write a travel blog about your exploits not that I have entered one yet!

Location aware applications allow you to share your location with your friends but you can also go public, though not necessarily revealing your exact location.  This would be a great way of discovering people you have lost touch with although I have not found anybody that way yet.  I have been approached by people I do not know on Rummble.

I have just been introduced to a similar service to Rummble called Loopt which I shall have to investigate further but I’m already feeling overwhelmed with location aware applications.  It would be good to find a source which analysed which location aware applications had the largest networks. 

Joining Up My Web Spaces

The explosion of social networking spaces on the internet has been exciting but also confusing.  The beauty of what is happening now is that many ‘space’ providers have recognised they are not going to provide everything and have everybody join them and have made it possible for developers to create the joins.  Now many of your spaces can be linked together.

Having joined a number of spaces I have now tried to work out how they link together, how they ‘feed’ one another.  I have produced a daigram which shows all my spaces and the links between them.  My Rummble can update my Twitter and include my location. My Twitter updates both ecademy and Facebook.  I can create a blog entry containing a phograph or video with Flickr and post it to my Blog in WordPress which then sends the blog to ecademy and Facebook.  The diagram does show that WordPress creates a Twitter every time I publish a blog, but I haven’t set this up. I can view my Flickr content from within Facebook and Rummble.  I can show my Google Reader Shares in my blog.  All the spaces in the big box update my FriendFeed.

The other great development is having versions of these spaces in PDA (small screen) format.  I can run all the spaces in green boxes on my windows mobile phone.  Rummble uses Google Gears on my mobile to link to my embedded GPS to capture my location.  Twibble also uses my embedded GPS to capture my location.

This is just the start, no doubt, of even more interlinking. It does show though how isolated LinkedIn has become.

 

My Social Network