Google launches "Near me now" | Hacker News Reader

Google launches "Near me now"

googlemobile.blogspot.com

22 pointsalexk12 comments

Everyone seems to be talking about and implementing location based services. It's an interesting area : but is the right problem being worked on?

I've needed to use a service like near me now just a few times in my life. Most of the time I do not wait till I am standing in a street in a particular place to start finding out what restaurants are around there.

A more useful service is this: searching within a crowded shopping street. Imagine you go to a shopping street, and there are crowds and stores everywhere. You could walk into all stores searching for that perfect bag, but what if you could just type 'bag' into your phone and it shows you all the hot bags currently being shopped at that street, and where exactly it is?

Real world searching is a good application of LBS. More useful than knowing the next restaurant.

Occasionally I am in desperate need of a similar service: I might need a particular kind of screwdriver, for example, and therefore want to know the nearest store that sells exactly that item (and ideally has it in stock). As far as I can tell there's not even an approximate solution to this problem yet.

http://milo.com is trying. God bless them.

This is amazing. I didn't know the iPhone could provide your location to web apps.

Let me ask you guys a question. I had an idea for a simple location based app. It simply tells you the next high and low tide for the nearest body of water to you. Should I just make that a web app since I can now get the iPhone's location, or should I still do a native iPhone app?

Advice, pros, cons?

http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html

The only question is fidelity of the underlying data. On mobile devices it can be very high. Most (all?) desktop browsers that support the Geolocation API just use the IP address, so Firefox says I live in Alameda, CA, even though I really live in Palo Alto.

No, I believe the iPhone shares it's location with the website. That's what this article is about.

Yes, through that API (AFAIK). Safari and Firefox both support it, but it depends on the fidelity of the location data available to the browser.

Obviously mobile Safari has access to better data than desktop Safari.

Makes me think Yelp might regret walking away. Of course, that is if that Google acquisition rumor had any truth at all.

Sounds like a better, more sensible solution than augmented reality for that purpose (which has always been buggy and annoying when I try to use it outside of a restaurant or similar).

The "Near me now" link does not show up on my Android devices.

At the bottom of the Google Mobile homepage, Settings -> Allow use of device location

Also, it's apparently only available on iPhone and Android 2.0+ for now.

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