[FOSS-GPS] Re: Geolocation services for FoxtrotGPS

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Guilhem Bonnefille <guilhem.bonnefille at gmail.com> writes:
> 2010/5/8 Joshua Judson Rosen <rozzin at geekspace.com>:
> >
> > Guilhem Bonnefille <guilhem.bonnefille at gmail.com> writes:
> > > Do you evaluated the telepathy framework? It already implement
> > > geolocation of friends over XMPP.
> > > http://telepathy.freedesktop.org/wiki/
> >
> > There hasn't been any discussion about the possibility of using
> > Telepathy yet--I was not aware that it already had support for
> > doing Geolocation over XMPP; that's exactly the sort of thing
> > that I like to hear, though :)
> 
> Did you read the following posts (in chronological order):
> http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/01/22/empathy-where-are-you/en/
> http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/06/15/geolocation-in-empathy-now-real/en/

Yes, I did.

> > Do you have any experience with these facilities?
> 
> Not really. But I will investigate on this direction. Furthermore, I
> don't know yet what are the services proposed by tangoGPS around
> "friends". Currently, my question is: is this service really useful
> compared to the service already proposed by empathy? Should we
> maintain such service in foxtrotGPS or should we remove it and focus
> foxtrotGPS on other direction?

No, I'm pretty certain that we should keep it--for various reasons.

For one, people do use it--if you turn it on, you can see quite a
number of users posting positions and messages; they deserve something
better than the system that's in place right now. Asking if they should
just go use Empathy instead is sort-of like asking if Empathy users
who want to see a map should just go use foxtrotGPS; obviously, there's
a certain overlap in functionality, but the roles are different enough
that it makes sense for both of them to continue--someone using foxtrotGPS
who wants `a GPS that can show where other people are and even send them
a message' isn't going to be satisfied using Empathy, and someone using
Empathy who wants `an IM client that can show where people are' probably
isn't going to be satisfied replaying Empathy with FoxtrotGPS.

The bigger reason is that, as per <http://www.foxtrotgps.org/roadmap.html>,
there will be a lot of GPS-, GIS-, and navigation-related features that
become possible when we have a generalised system for supporting arbitrary
sets of moving targets and communicating information about them between
instances--tracking `friends' is just one possibility. It'll also open up
the possibility of doing things like `live POIs', storm-tracking, notices
of road-closings and emergency-services activity, commercial dispatch,
or even real-time traffic-/congestion-monitoring. Most of that those things
are out in the distance (some of them further than others), but it all
starts here.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."