One of the interesting things about web-wired mobile devices, is the ability to quickly geolocate the user, either by GPS, either by cell-tower antenna id, either by networked wifi ip.
This single ability should provide tremendous possibilities in terms of social networks, and in terms of added value by leveraging massive amounts of user's geo-tracks (while preserving privacy and anonimacy). Another cool ability is snapshot-updating social networks.



Right now, we're seeing a boom in location-aware social networks for mobile devices. Services like loopt, wizi, brightkite, pownce, lightpole, socialight, cence me, zintin and many others (btw, what are the services that you use and like?). Another interesting light-weighted mobile social-network, good for today's most regular phones, would be handivi.

However, the major technological bottleneck for this new eco-system to strive, is the device battery-life. Today's smartphones and pdas drain all the power in just a few hours. This is a big problem that is bound to stick around for a while, (unless some physics Nobel prizer comes up with a brilliant solution). Hence, the user experience becomes seriously degraded. Each time the user performs any new action on his device, his brain is trained to assess the power-drain damage it'll do to it, as he always wants to keep the phone functional for the basic tasks, such as receiving calls, receiving agenda alerts, take that one-in-a-lifetime snapshot, etc... This is problematic because it skews A LOT the natural rate of exploration on the device's new possibilities: "Ouh - I could toy around with this new cool-looking web-app... Oh, yeah, I shouldn't do that, cuz then I'd have little power left for receiving important calls. Right... better stay idle with it for the time being" :(
This is actually how my brain works with my iphone, when I'm outdoors. I only test & toy at home where I have the power cable nearby. This limits A LOT my learning curve on new iPhone apps. Power IS the real bottleneck for mobile exploration. (I'm assuming this is case for other smartphones and PDAs).



Thus, the best solution would be to build more efficient power consuming phones and more efficient power consuming apps.

In particular, each time I authorize an app to take advantage of my geo-position, I'm multiplying the GPS usage AND potentiating the power-drain syndrom. So, suppose that I take a snapshot and that I want to send it to facebook, to flickr, to zintin, to wizi, to evernote and that I also want to email it to some friends, plus I want to update my location on wizi and on cenceme at the same time. For each of these apps I must drain power (and bandwidth) to upload (redundantly) the image and to get a GPS fix for my location! Wow, that is NOT efficient!

In this post, I'm advocating the relevancy for geo-aware mobile apps to rely on fire eagle as their sole provider of server-sided users location tags. And to rely on tarpipe to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

fire eagle, developped by yahoo!, is an API enabled, users geo-tracks database. It stores all its users locations, and then provides a free API for user-authorized third-party developpers to extract the user's location and/or update the user's location.



tarpipe is an "upload once, update many" service (kind of like ping.fm, but for snapshots as well) that works really well!



To improve energy efficiency from GPS usage, I pledge the developpers to ask fire eagle for the user location rather than asking the user's device for its location. That way, the user updates once its location on Fire-eagle and, automatically, all its authorized geo-aware social-networks and services get updated. Thus, if it had 10 location based services, it would drain 10 times less power with the GPS. Right now I'm using Firefone to update my location on Fire-Eagle.

Likewise, if the user builds a smart, easy looking workflow on tarpipe, its photo emailed-attachs would be forwarded to all its favorited services, like twitter, pownce, jaiku, flickr, photobucket and evernote. That'll be 4 times less bandwidth AND 4 times less energy consumption for that user. So, I pledge the users to use a tarpipe workflow to "upload once, update many" social-networks.

Below you can see a diagram of how things are today, the wrong way :p



and how things could be tomorrow, the right way :)



So, developpers, be smart! Use fire eagle when location matters. And users, be smart! Use tarpipe when you want to update many services at once. With this in mind, you'll hopefully drain less power from your device, and yet have the same functionality.