Fire Eagle Badge: Observations

The FireEagle badge has been up for a week and I have users checking in from Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Moscow and Isle of Man. Oh also Iowa. Very cool.

I’ve been using ZoneTag to update my personal FireEagle location, which I figured out has a ‘continuous upload’ mode, so I don’t have to take an unnecessary picture to report my location. This has the unintended effect of making my badge perpetually current. This would be very eerie if I was updating my exact, instead of approximate location. I’d try updating exact location but the GPS kills my phone — plus it’s not so hot in the city.

On the accuracy end of things, my location badge is only as accurate as the service writing to FireEagle. In the case of ZoneTag, although I am Brooklyn Zonetag insists on putting me in “New York, NY”. Passing that information to Yahoo maps gives me a map of the Upper West Side. That still shows that I am in the five Burroughs area and not Iowa but I don’t like the misleading implication of the pinpoint map. One way around this may be to implement the “i’m in this general vicinity” map overlay box like on the FireEagle website.

Finally, i’ve always been interested in passively recording location so without any extra effort I can see all the places i’ve been the past year. I could do this with my badge except that it runs on a pull from the FireEagle API. It only requests my location if someone loads the page where the badge is embedded. So a log entry is inserted only when the badge is loaded. If I have changed my location ten times in the past day but my badge (embedded in my blog) has not been visited even once, those locations will be lost. To that end i’ve written a cron that periodically loads up my blog every once in a while so I don’t loose any locations. Now I can generate a dynamic places i’ve slept map.