When will the web-browser know where we are? Hopefully sometime soon.. probably not.

FireEagle (by Yahoo) is a nice first step. Have different applications tell FireEagle where you are and have web-apps request your location (with different accuracies) from FireEagle. Nice.. but not really straight forward and end-user friendly. End-users will have to have a FireEagle (Yahoo) account, some software accessing and updating this account with your current location and actually using the account in third-party web-apps. Hmmm.. how many users will do this?

Google is taking another approach. They are already working on a Geolocation API for browsers that are empowered by Gears. Really nice.. and they are pushing it towards the W3C also. It seems that Google is again opening up more of their services to third party developers, even though they first didn’t want the world to know. And this is really end-user friendly.. when it is build in in all mayor browsers

One drawback.. what if we’re requesting the location of the users of our services from Google? Currently we’re doing this for geocoding already. Next thing we’re asking Google for our users actual location. Google..Google..Google.. scary..