Sometimes I want to bookmark my physical location to the cloud. When I’m at an interesting place, when I want to let others know where I am, or just for later reference.
Having an iPhone 3G with GPS there are plenty of tracking applications and location based social networks around that can more or less do this for me. The problem with tracking applications for iPhone is that they suck. They suck on your iPhone’s battery and they suck because they have to run in the foreground on your iPhone. You can’t do anything else with your iPhone while tracking. Also for me tracking is overkill. I just want to bookmark a place now and then and not create a log of how I’ve been moving around. Location based social networks like Brightkite are an option, but many times my physical bookmarks don’t belong there because they lack meaning for anybody else than me. Another problem for me with both these solutions is that they not always offer a georss feed.
I found a very elegant and simple way for bookmarking your physical location directly to a RSS feed in the cloud.
What you need:
- Yahoo Fire Eagle account
- EagleFeed (authorized by Fire Eagle)
- iPhone 3G with the free Yofe! application (iTunes link)
Create a Fire Eagle account and authorize EagleFeed. EagleFeed is a service that generates a georss feed using Fire Eagle. Now install Yofe! on your iPhone and authorize it with Fire Eagle as well. What I like so much about Yofe! is that it is very basic and very simple. You only need to start the application and it will automatically post your GPS coordinates to Fire Eagle.
EagleFeed will start generating your georss feed as soon as you start posting your location to Fire Eagle. You can of course use your georss feed in many ways. You could add it to Friendfeed, Twitterfeed or your RSS reader. Or why not copy and paste the georss feed URL in your own Google Maps map?
Blog Post: Create Your Own Georss Feed Using an iPhone, Fire Eagle, Yofe! and EagleFeed @http://bit.ly/ADVLh
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
How to make your own personal GeoRSS feed with Fire Eagle: http://tinyurl.com/d76be4
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
There is a location based application that can do this for you. It’s called Baralbait.com
You can create an account there, and then you can integrate your account with FireEagle or if you do not have a GPS enabled phone you can just check in into the already created places there. You can aslo create your own places – and if they lack meaning for anybody else than you – you can set their privacy to only you so that no e;se will see them.
Also you will have your own GeoRSS feed with all your check-ins, wall posts there, etc.
And finally the good thing about the people behind Baralbait is that they are dynamic and looking forward to listed to people’s suggestions and feedback, and have no problem adding any features after discussing them with their users.
http://www.baralbait.com/
Eaglefeed is great stuff. I use the feed they generate, parse it and put it in the “I’m currently at” section in my blog. No need to put fancy dopplr/brightkite etc badges that would to get that functionality.
Rohit Nair’s last blog post..Phew!
Thanks for stopping by on my blog.