Wednesday of last week I met with Ryan Snyder of shizzow and we talked about various geo-stuff, including shizzow's upcoming API and where IceCondor is going. He reminded me that shizzow makes an RSS feed available of my shouts. The RSS feed includes the GeoRSS information of lat/long.
I investigated brightkite and it publishes a GeoRSS feed of my shouts and my friend's shouts. Other services are likely to have such feeds as well. Its relatively simple for the icecondor client to consume the RSS data from a variety of location services. When I started writing this article, i was under the assumption that shizzow had an RSS feed for my friend's shouts. Shizzow does not have a feed for my friend's shouts but you can help change that by saying you like this idea.
Services that a GeoRSS reader would likely consume:
| Service Name | My Checkins | My Friend's Checkins |
| BrightKite | http://brightkite.com/people/donpdonp/objects.rss+ | http://brightkite.com/people/donpdonp/friendstream.rss+* |
| Shizzow | https://www.shizzow.com/donpdonp/rss | N/A |
+ = Also available in .json
This could start a new subclass of applications - GeoRSS readers. Feeds are consumed, and a map is displayed. Additionally, a friend proximity alarm of some sort would be awesome. Also, a group alert when 2 or more followed friends are in the same location. wow that feels big-brotherish but thats also why its useful, in the right hands.
I've been feeling for a while that IceCondor is two halves put together. The write-side which turns on the phone's GPS, queues location data, and pushes that data to a server. The read-side currently consumes an invented json format from icecondor.com but i see that consuming GeoRSS feeds is a much more flexible way to go. It is a read-only API that is simple to implement.
What other location services do you use and is there a GeoRSS feed for it? FireEagle is the other big service i can think of and it has no RSS feed for the last update, nor a notion of history at all.
The standard RSS readers I know of are all free. Even newsfire, the sexy OS X RSS reader that used to have free and pay editions, is now free as well. I dont think the read-side piece of icecondor has a revenue model, though I'd like to hear opinions on that. It is still a useful step on the way to a consumer-ready reader and writer edition of icecondor.