Where 2.0 First Day – Does Google’s Friend Connect have a Spatial Component?
May 12th, 2008by Sean Gorman
About the Author: Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users.
Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this authorWe are all set up here in cosmopolitan Burlingame for the fun of Where 2.0. Thus far we’ve sat in on Advanced GIS Hacks in Rails and are currently enjoying the GeoServer tutorial. There is a bit of a lull in the action, so I thought I would talk about something completely different.
Specifically, I got an email with a link saying Google was going to be launching “Friend Connect” at Where 2.0. Problem is I’ve not read anything on the blogs or else where that has talked about Friend Connect having a geospatial component.
It would be awesome if they’ve enabled something to embed your location into a social profile, but seems like that would be more ambitious than what has been outlined in the press releases and speculation. Google does have a talk tomorrow on the “State of the GeoWeb”, maybe we’ll find out there. Has anyone heard rumors one way or the other?
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