Some Uät thoughts
December 17th, 2007Whilst demoing Uät today, I described the service in a way that needs to be blogged.
Uät is a location service, it is not a surveillance service. The Uät user has complete control over the voluntary disclosure of his location, unlike services that work by triangulation, where users are under surveillance wether they like it or not.
People are becoming (rightly) more sensitive about privacy and Uät is a service that respects the privacy of its users, giving them absolute control over the manner in which they disclose their location. There is no need to have a surveillance system in order to create a very useful location service; not only are we able to deliver precise locations thanks to the way that the system works, but we are also able to give the user control over who gets to see where they are at the level of our service.
During this party season, there are many events on where the location of the party is kept secret until the last minute. It was suggested to us today that someone could use Uät to organize the distribution of a party location. The party organizer would publish his nickname in every advertisement and flyer for the party, along with instruction on how to become his ‘friend’ (U @ chum raveup). Uät would be used to collect party goers as friends to the organizer’s nickname, and when he is ready to divulge the secret location, all he has to do is set his location on the night of the party with a single text and all the revellers will be texted with the address. The organizer gets an added benefit of a ‘control panel’ listing all of his new friends….hmmmmm can you say “Enterprise Version”?!!!
We are really looking forward to the ways that our API is going to be used. We have just cleaned it up and added some new calls. There are at least three applications in development for it that should be out in January.