Seeding landmarks by people who will socialize there
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Ed Arnold made a comment on one of our older blog posts about the seeding of landmarks that I want to share with everyone.
“Why not allow users to seed the landmarks? We could do this using our own iPhones and then we can seed the landmarks that are important to us. This makes more sense, esp. for people who will socialize in the same area.”
Yes, Ed, this is our goal. Users generate landmarks; users keep them interesting with nice photos and up-to-date information (microblogs and articles) – like a urban revitalization concept. We then create cool apps to discover and socialize around the landmarks.
Right now, you can post landmarks at http://www.openlandmark.com/post (use the same sign-in account info as Fon11). Currently, you can only post one landmark at a time. So it’s a little painstaking. In about a week or so, we will have other posting mechanisms that will speed up the creation of landmarks. It will take advantage of geo-tagged photos.Also, at the moment we are intentionally restricting the metros to only a few places to demonstrate our concept. We originally tried opening all metros around the world, but people were getting lost setting empty countries and metros. We will re-gen our system with metros in every nation around the world. Please give us a week or so.
Regarding posting landmarks from the iPhone: we need the SDK. Even with that, I am not sure whether we can use Skyhook’s WiFi/Cell Tower locations for landmarks. It might not be precise enough to use as a landmark for navigation. We prefer to use a GPS data logger, such as the one from Holux. We will soon provide a form to upload a bunch of photos to our server and bookmark them as landmarks quickly.
