after fixing some problems, the icecondor client is operating with high reliability, and gaining my trust to report my location without assistance. i made two trips outside of the house today and got great data from each trip. the GPS mechanism in android always gives a fix unless the GPS signal is blocked. Once gps fix queuing is implemented in the client, the data uploaded will make a major jump in the number of points reported.

My 600mhz linux server is certainly not going to hold the world's location data, so what exactly is being built here? the server software is simple and could be reproduced by any webapp developer. The android client is nuanced but nothing spectacular. What I'm doing is being the first. The iPhone platform simply does not support this kind of application, while Android seems to be custom designed for it. Background tasks are incredibly important to lifestyle applications.

already i'm making decisions about who i mention the existence of icecondor to, among those who would actually be interested in tracking me. the number of users is very low. i use it the most, dietrich a. uses it some, and bryan s. uses it occasionally. there are decisions to make about how to approach the discovery and permissions of sharing the data. i am still interested in the phone being a repository of location data as well - a peer to peer system.

i'm giving not-so-subtle hits to my friends to try using icecondor to find out where i am. i'd love some kind of iPhone client if only to read the position of android users, and do manual updates of their location. though that is not very exciting other than the sheer numbers of iPhones out there. Most of my twitter friends already have the iPhone, at least 20. Only 3 have G1s. that will change in time of course.

the road map to a for-pay version looks like: Queuing the fixes on the phone until the next transmit. Automatic version checking/upgrade. Some kind of basic permission control to reading someone's feed. That adds authentication and authorization which means OpenID and OAUTH. Then an amazon flexible payment service activity to sign up for a $1/month service.

also how does icecondor scale beyond me? will it become another soul-crushing 9-to-5 place with regular employees? if i can really make it work how i want it, working from home will be the norm. employees will share in ownership and profits. mozilla would be a good model for transparency. i like how their employee meetings are held on public irc channels.