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Google Buzz | Saturday, March 6th, 2010 - 12:13am | Permalink

David on Google Buzz

Nowadays more and more services get location awareness. Through devices like smartphones the mobile web is on the rise. Being able to use the Internet not just personalized also optimized to our current location, web services take off from being useful to being indispensable.

It seems like though, mobile devices are smarter when it comes to location. They're equipped with GPS or Wifi sensors to determine their position and are able to provide that information to services we use. Unlike all these computers we use the rest of the day.

I realize that when I switched my G1 the first time from airplane to standard mode after deboarding a plane and it automatically adjusted to the change of timezone, I was stunned. Albeit it such a low-tech thing a phone should be capable of. Notebooks you carry on still won't do this. By accessing a foreign network, your computer should be able to adjust to its new location the same way mobile devices do.

A first attempt in the right direction is Geosense (geosenseforwindows.com), a virtual sensor for Windows 7 written by Rafael Rivera and Long Zheng. It uses Google Location Services (Wifi and IP) to provide the built-in Location and Sensors Platform with accurate and reasonably ubiquitous positioning information without requiring or the assistance of GPS hardware.

Now I just require my OS to utilize that information and change my settings accordingly as soon as a new location is detected. For now it just provides that little weather gadget, which I don't have any use for. I can think of many other useful features...