Pyroute share server
Ideas for a server component to mobile applications. Note: this page is just for ideas - see Implementations section for actual servers.
Scenarios
Meeting up
Meeting up with a bunch of people for some highly-mobile event. You want to share position data to do cool stuff like meeting-up at random places without advance planning. (Note: you have a certain nickname that you use with this group of people, so no 'global' name options)
wikis already being used for this ;)
Map party
There's an OSM mapping party. You want to share tracklogs, so that as you map a town you can see what the other people have done (for navigation, and to avoid overlap). You might want to sketch on the blank map and share those with others.
GeoBlog
There's stuff that you want to blog about, related to locations. So when you pass a favourite pub, or see an interesting bit of graffiti, you can upload as a waypoint (which other people can aggregate to get GeoRSS of interesting things)
Mobile event
Come track the progress of our carnival, march, or critical mass from your PC or phone. All it needs is one person setting their phone to "share location" mode
Trail guides
As part of a leisure (cycle, walk, etc) group, you share details of your rides. After going around some nice ride, you can upload it directly.
Follow my route
Your colleagues are competing to find the best route between two cities that you all regularly visit. Once you found a route, send a copy of it to the person who's just about to leave.
- Positions (current location)
- Bookmarks (i.e. waypoints)
- Routes
- Drawings on the map
Tech
Basically just a REST interface that's easy for simple-minded applications to do stuff with, and a web interface for anything complex (like administering who's allowed to post data to your group)
Nice-to-have features
Provable security; e.g. you agree out-of-band that all an event's locations will be stored relative to some point and anyone not knowing that point won't be able to get your lat/long even if they crack or monitor the server.
Trivial authentication. Instead of creating a username and profile and email address, it just allocates you a number that you use to access the account (so that you can type it easily into the phone. and you can add friends to your list by typing the UID half of their number)
Works on unreliable networks. If someone walks past a wifi point after an hour of no network signal, it should download all the stored data they want. If it gets really bad it should be try to compress the most essential data into SMS messages
Implementations
See also
Blogging software that lets you store a position with the entries.
The KDE geoaware desktop