If you would rather display your location information to friends in your town, than type out where you are, Palringo IM's new location-finding feature will appeal to you.
Palringo Local, as the new feature is called, released on Tuesday in an automatic update for the Windows Mobile application.
The location-aware feature is strictly opt-in. Like most apps of this ilk, its controls allow you to go offline at will and to set limits on who can and can't see you.
If Palringo Local can't find you, or miscalculates, you can always set your location yourself.
The location feature is scheduled to come to Palringo's other mobile platforms by the year's end.
Updated at 2:30 p.m. PDT to include more details about how location information is displayed and gathered in JuiceCaster, and more specific information about the feature's launch.
First came mobile social networks, then came geotagging. Since location-based features take advantage of your ever-portable mobile phone to pin your activities to a place, we weren't surprised to learn that on Wednesday JuiceCaster (reviewed) added automatic geo-anchors to its multimedia sharing service.
Soon JuiceCaster photos and videos that are auto-posted to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites will share the individual's street name and city. Friends who keep a close eye on geotags can use that to gain contextual understanding of the scene or use it to "bump into" friends nearby. In an important distinction, JuiceCaster's location feature is designed to be optional and visible only to confirmed friends.
The city and state appear on the player shown on CEO Nick Desai's JuiceCaster page.
(Credit: Nick Desai)A final tidbit called "Who was here?" attaches further meaning to a place. Selecting it from the menu will call together a list of photos and videos for that most-wanted location. You'll be able to browse through the content or add your own. You'll also be able to seek out geotagged photos and videos by location, which may muscle up JuiceCaster's searching accuracy.
JuiceCaster's new location-based functionality will become available "shortly" for GPS-enabled cell phones running on the BREW platform before rolling out to other carriers' GPS phones.
Typing your starting point on a typical cell phone search tool can get tedious, even if you've got a high-end device with a QWERTY keyboard. A GPS-enabled cell phone can wipe those tears away, but since about 85 percent of handsets do not have GPS, most users are out of luck.
Google Maps for Mobile with My Location draws enough information from local cell phone towers to figure out where you are and then uses that information to launch a search. The idea is it saves you search time and manual effort. How well does it work? Get a glimpse in the First Look video .
You should note before downloading that Google Maps for Mobile sends anonymous radio information back to Google. If you don't want to become lab research, you may disable the entire feature from the Help menu. However, you would miss out on the most significant new keypad shortcuts.
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