Posts Tagged ‘location sharing’

dotspott public pages

New feature added to dotspott earlier this week: you can now create a public URL for any of your spotts, which will generate a page that looks something like the following,

dotspott public page, 63 bites

… and is accessible to anyone on the web.

Currently this can only be done from the web client:

  • Login
  • Click “Share…” on the submenu for the spott you want to make a link for
  • Click the “Make Public” button; the spott will be made public and the URL will appear

Note: All spotts are private by default; they can only be seen by you when you login or by someone with whom you’ve shared the spott info via email.

Edit: I should mention this is a proof of concept of Unity. There are actually no async calls beyond those for Google Maps.

Share hotspots via email

A small, but useful addition to hotspotdot: you can now share hotspots via. email.

hotspot shared via. email, shown in gmail client

Currently only available on the web client, but this and a few other features will soon make their way into the webOS mobile app.

At one point I did consider making a larger social networking component integrated into the site – sharing hotspots with other hotspotdot users – however, I don’t think this would have been very useful, certainly not to me. In many ways hotspotdot is fairly anti-social, focused much more on functionality revolving around maintaining your personal repository of locations rather than the current location of your friends and whether or not they’ve checked-in at some commercial venue; the concept underlying other location services such as Google Latitude, foursquare, and Facebook Places.