tag:google.com,2010:buzz:z12awfgo2mylzlpq404ccnti2wb4ejnxysk0k
Julian Bond Julian Bond 106416716945076707395
27 May 2011 27 May 2011 Mobile Public
Been looking at the RSS/Atom feeds from Google Latitude. The problem is they are hard to find and...
Been looking at the RSS/Atom feeds from Google Latitude. The problem is they are hard to find and they use yet another User ID for your Google account that is also almost impossible to find. There's no home profile page with an obvious URL, no way of seeing other people's home profile page/history and no RSS/Atom auto-discovery. I can't work out if this is all due to privacy issues seeing as the settings page says "Your history will not be visible publicly or to your Latitude friends." or because it's all just half baked. All of this means that if I want to aggregate other people's history via the RSS/Atom where they opt in by giving me their ID, I can't do it, because there's no way that's easy enough for them to tell me their URL or ID. I've got to give them detailed instructions to go through the Apps, developer pages and give me the atom URL. Even after doing that, the Atom feed has no to a profile/history page. There are very similar problems with Foursquare where the RSS/Atom feed is hidden away and uses obfuscated URLs with an ID that doesn't match up to your profile ID. This stuff is just really irritating and it's the wrong way to handle privacy issues because there's a significant number of people who want to share this information, at least as big as the numbers of people who are paranoid about it and don't want to share it. It's also symptomatic of a general trend in 2011 web development where the mobile app gets done first, the web app done maybe and all that good metadata that was important to us 5 years ago, not at all.
Been looking at the RSS/Atom feeds from Google Latitude. The problem is they are hard to find and they use yet another User ID for your Google account that is also almost impossible to find. There's no home profile page with an obvious URL, no way of seeing other people's home profile page/history and no RSS/Atom auto-discovery. I can't work out if this is all due to privacy issues seeing as the settings page says "Your history will not be visible publicly or to your Latitude friends." or because it's all just half baked. All of this means that if I want to aggregate other people's history via the RSS/Atom where they opt in by giving me their ID, I can't do it, because there's no way that's easy enough for them to tell me their URL or ID. I've got to give them detailed instructions to go through the Apps, developer pages and give me the atom URL. Even after doing that, the Atom feed has no <link> to a profile/history page.

There are very similar problems with Foursquare where the RSS/Atom feed is hidden away and uses obfuscated URLs with an ID that doesn't match up to your profile ID. This stuff is just really irritating and it's the wrong way to handle privacy issues because there's a significant number of people who want to share this information, at least as big as the numbers of people who are paranoid about it and don't want to share it. It's also symptomatic of a general trend in 2011 web development where the mobile app gets done first, the web app done maybe and all that good metadata that was important to us 5 years ago, not at all.
20 Musley Ln, Ware 20 Musley Ln, Ware 20 Musley Ln, Ware, Hertfordshire SG12 7, UK 51.8137907 -0.0260081
tag:google.com,2010:buzz-comment:z12awfgo2mylzlpq404ccnti2wb4ejnxysk0k:1306481613955000
Julian Bond Julian Bond 106416716945076707395
Some people opt to route their Latitude into Buzz. The item has this at the top.
"Google Latitude Check-in - Private to Latitude friends"
and there's a map below you can click on to see the location. Can you see the irony in this?
27 May 2011 27 May 2011
tag:google.com,2010:buzz-comment:z12awfgo2mylzlpq404ccnti2wb4ejnxysk0k:1307045894870000
Solveigh Calderin Solveigh Calderin 103424489628829206631
Is it good, if everyone knows, where am I at the moment? I would not like this, to be honest... 2 Jun 2011 2 Jun 2011