* Creating real-time visual records of a cellular subscriber's movements
I’ve written about Google Maps a couple of times over the last few months – see “Google: First the earth, now the moon” and “Third parties take Google Maps one step further”.
A new type of service based on Google Maps has recently appeared called “fauxjacking” (if you want to see which sites are talking about fauxjacking you’ll have to search for “fauxjack” – the other term will just get no hits and the suggestion that you might want to search for a common obfuscation of an Anglo-Saxon vulgarism.)
Fuaxjacking allows GPS equipped cell phones to post the user’s latitude and longitude to a Web site which then displays their waypoints using maps created through the use of Google Map’s API.
Run by the pseudonymous LemonHead and GravityMonkey, Mologogo is a fauxjacking service that provides a free Java application (available here – registration required) to create real-time visual records of a subscriber’s movements. The site’s creators explain the service thusly:
“Mologogo is social software built atop a mini-GPS mapping system for your phone. It currently works on pretty much any Nextel phone with Java and GPS. We’ve tested a bunch of phones ourselves but check out the wiki to see about your specific model.”
The aforementioned wiki is here and the list of tested phones here.
The explanation continues:
“Mologogo is totally ‘alpha’ right now, but improving rapidly. It was built as a Web 2.0 app, so expect integration with sites like Flickr, Upcoming.org, Judy’s book, and lots more RubyOnRails/AJAX-y goodness added to our UI. And with our soon to be released API, you’ll be able to access your own location data in other sites.”
Accounts on Mologogo are free and after logging in you can see your own location and track as well as those of your friends.
This is a fascinating idea but as LemonHead and GravityMonkey note, the Mologogo service is in its early days and the site has occasional alpha release type problems. Even so, it is a great proof of concept and undoubtedly the first of many similar services.
