[jdev] update on XMPP location (wherein beer is offered)

[Simon Tennant]

A quick heads up on the state of XMPP location from Buddycloud Towers.

The Buddycloud Social-Location-Server is now accepting XEP-0255
formatted location queries from *any* external JID.

The server is and XMPP component addressable at butler.buddycloud.com.
It listens for XEP-0255 formatted query stanzas and replies with your
location and if you are near one of your defined places, your place name
(Home, Work, My Castle). It also pushes your location and place details
to your PEP geoloc node so that your friends know where you are. (We are
keen to have publishing to external pub-sub working when we have a free
moment.)

Looking beyond the XEP-0255 standard (just defines querying location
using wifi, cell towers and bluetooth), we are keen to standardise some
of the other stanzas associated with place management and querying for
nearby objects such as people, places or media.  If you would like to
work together on this, please get in touch. Additionally we are working
with the OSLO group to address sharing location between companies.

To give you an idea how XMPP location stuff works in the wild, I've put
together a stanza capture of Kirk's (also lurking on these lists)
journey to work. The stanza are visible in their full glory here:
http://www.buddycloud.com/cms/node/90

And now for the beer part.

It's springtime in Munich and the beergardens are opening. A XMPP nearby
query will show you placemarks in the vicinity.  So, to test external
JIDs work and make things a little more interesting, I'm offering a cold
Maß of beer to the first person to reply with the correct beergarden for
the beer to redeemed at. In order to calculate this you will need to
sequentially query (3 separate stanzas) the following three cell tower
identifiers, run a nearby query and a place details query:

262:07:51520:34124757
262:07:51520:34104756
262:07:51520:34084753

(flights to Munich not included)

S.
-- 

Simon Tennant
Buddycloud
uk: +44 20 7043 6756               de: +49 89 420 955 854  
uk: +44 78 5335 6047               de: +49 17 8545 0880	
email and xmpp: simon at buddycloud.com