Tag Archives: gps

Location Determining via SMS

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Imagine two still not so unusual situations:

  1. Your friend on Small.World has our mobile app open and wants to contact you but has no Internet access for the time being. You may be in the same position.
  2. Your friend has the app open but no Internet access.Ā  They want to know where you are at the moment. Luckily, you do have web connection and they have offline maps. But again, what about your exact location they need to know right now?

Well, Small.World has a solution for such cases: the good old Short Message Service (SMS) protocol. Sending text messages is built in Small.World (subject to network provider fees) so you don’t have to leave our app, go to your phonebook and find the right person in order to send a text. You just send straight from our app.Below we show how it works from the technical viewpoint:

SMS Scheme

SMS can also be used to share your location with someone who’s offline at the moment. In Small.World you can choose an option to share your location via text. This will send an SMS with geocoordinates to your friend. And those long decimal numbers will be automatically converted by Small.World into a map location.

SMS Map

References

  1. Brown, J., Shipman, B. & Vetter, R., 2007. SMS: The Short Message Service. Computer, 40(12).
  2. Jensen, K., 2011. How to Send Text Messages with PHP. Envato Pty Ltd. Available at: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-send-text-messages-with-php–net-17693 [Accessed April 27, 2015].

Geosocial Networking

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The advancement in geographical information system (GIS) made the geosocial networking born. Such networking is enriched by geographic services such as geo tagging and geo coding by using coordinates taking from global positioning system (GPS) technology (Ruiz Vicente et al., 2011).

Geo tagging is using geographic metadata to different media such as photo and video. Geo tagging technology is really useful because it gives the exact location of a friend who checked in on to a service. On the other hand, geo codding is the process of adding location information by geographic coordination to identify the addresses such post code or street name etc.

The Geosocial networking is matching users with their place such as (meeting groups, concerts, restaurants etc…) to socialize and facilitating meeting groups and plan activity. Also it gives the opportunity to meet others who are geographically closer and who have similar interests. It is also increase business ability to target more audience and find out what is near you is much easier

However, some times this type of technology leads to privacy invasion by disseminating too much personal information on the web. Pleaserobme.com is a website that criticize ironically to make people aware of oversharing.

geosocialGeosocial Networking Concept (Ruiz Vicente et al., 2011)

What is missing in the existing social networking now is building acommunity in real life. This can be achieved by Small.World through using geosocial networking and also enabling friends of friend to see your activities to broaden the network. Meeting peopleā€™s with the same interest in the around geographic location give you more options to make more friends in real life.

 

Ā RefrencesĀ 

Ruiz Vicente, C., Freni, D., Bettini, C. and Jensen, C. (2011). Location-Related Privacy in Geo-Social Networks. IEEE Internet Comput., 15(3), pp.20-27.