iPhone Core Location Is Where It’s At

This could not be more correct. I’m not sure if co-location is the killer use (it’s certainly an awesome one) that will come throughout the life of mobile apps - but as Apple will continue to innovate on thier mobile platform, more and more uses will come out. Eventually, as the iPhone takes a huge marketshare (reminiscent of iPod) it will bring the interaction that normals currently only have when at a home or office to their pocket, their street corner, etc.  and that’s exciting.

joelaz:

Last week’s announcement from Apple on the iPhone SDK developer tools got tons of press, but the feature I find most interesting was buried in the news. It’s called Core Location. When Facebook opened their Apps platform to third party developers, the killer apps were ones that leveraged the most compelling feature of Facebook - the social graph. I believe that the killer apps for the iPhone will leverage the key differentiating feature of a mobile device… namely, location and the fact that the phone moves with you through the real world.

Every iPhone has the ability today to identify your location by triangulating the distance from nearby cell phone towers. In my experience, it’s usually accurate within a few city blocks. With the SDK, developers can start building location-aware apps that access that geo-location data. That opens up some pretty interesting capabilities. For years, people have talked about location aware apps. For example, you might sign up for a service that alerts you if people on your buddy list are at a bar down the street. Or, imagine if all the photos you took on your iPhone were automatically tagged with location data before you sent them to Flickr. I made a really rough mobile Twitter hack months ago that integrated Google Maps with Twitter so that my Twitter friends would not only know what I’m doing, but WHERE I’m doing it, including specific coordinates on a map and directions. That was just a proof-of-concept, but Apple’s SDK announcement is going to make a lot of these things a reality on a wide scale this June when the third-party apps hit the market. The concept is particularly interesting when combined with a centralized location developer platform like Fire Eagle.

What type of location-aware apps would you like on your phone?

Speaking of Fire Eagle, below are some invites to the developer beta. It’s only going to be interesting to software developers… the consumer interface for Fire Eagle hasn’t launched yet. Each of these invites will only work for one person, so first come, first serve.

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/792weKuumHNhrL0r

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/WzKtkzj2PKDnxxky

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/VMq5MccYrMgcfd4J

http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ticket/aaVv6IdRe6Oxq05b

Enjoy!