Introducing the Gears Geolocation API for all laptop WiFi users
By Charles Wiles, Product Manager,
Google Mobile TeamI am thrilled to announce that today we
have enhanced the Gears Geolocation API so that developers can now securely locate users to
within 200m accuracy in major desktop browsers in hundreds of cities around the world. Whether
your users are Chrome, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or (soon) Opera users, you can now
automatically deliver an experience that is tailored to their current location. For example,
lastminute.com's new Radar
application allows users to find nearby hotels,
ITN's Google Earth mash up in Firefox
allows users to see nearby news stories and
Rummble's
social discovery site allows users to automatically set their current location for
friends to see.
When we originally proposed the
Gears Geolocation
API our goal was to make it easy for developers to deliver location enabled web
sites on mobile phones. However we realized laptop users would benefit from location enabled
web sites too. Today we are adding WiFi signals to the Geolocation API so that laptop users
can benefit from location enabled web sites for the first time and mobile users from the
increased accuracy. And because the Geolocation API is the same for developers in both desktop
and mobile browsers you can even use the same code on both platforms!
In Chrome and Android, with Gears built in, you can deliver a location enabled web site
without requiring your users to install a plug-in, but in other browsers they will need to go
through a simple plug-in install process. We also submitted a simplified version of the
Geolocation API as a
WC3
specification and the upcoming Firefox 3.1 plans to support the W3C version
directly. The Gears Geolocation API is completely free to developers and users through the
default Google location provider.
To protect user privacy, the Gears
Geolocation API server does not record user location. However, third party sites may do so,
and we recommend that users only allow web sites they trust to access their location. Gears
will always tell a user when your site wants to access their location for the first time and
the user can either allow or deny your site permission. We recommend users check the privacy
policy of your web site if they are in doubt as to how your site may use location information.
