Finally, I’m back into doing something that I love - fiddling with new ideas.

Today, Google released Google Gears 0.4 with geolocation. For those of you not yet aware of Google Gears, it’s an attempt by the big G to enhance the client-side with a variety of rich add-ons, such as local databases, offline services and smoother integration with the host OS.

Gears is also available for Windows Mobile devices and, with the addition of geolocation, adds some exciting spice to the mobile platform.

Previously I’ve made aborted attempts to use a combination of Navizon (a mobile tracking service), Fire Eagle (Yahoo!’s location “platform”) and iamnear.net (Tom Taylor’s very handy directory of POIs). It works to a point, but is a hopelessly elongated way of serving geo-aware content from a web browser.

With Gears 0.4 it’s now possible for the browser to interrogate directly the user’s location, through a combination of cell IDs and GPS (where available). The natural conclusion is to slap this tool onto the front of something like iamnear.net, et voila, you have a location-aware website puling information directly from the client.

Without further ado, check out my painfully basic demo - you’ll need Windows Mobile 5/6 and Google Gears (if it is not detected, it’ll prompt you to install).

As a bonus, the site will also work on your desktop, but I’m presuming that’d only be available with a GPS dongle of some kind?

I’d love to spice it up a bit - actually without presuming too much I’m fairly sure this is a natural upgrade to iamnear.net and other sites… if you have any thoughts feel free to post below

Google Reader always was a little odd with its unread posts count - sometimes not updating its post count until I “did” something in Reader (e.g. refresh), but more recently over the last couple of days it’s been quite a way out. Is anybody else experiencing this?

All the refreshing in the world won’t clear those 3 “new” items, but a couple of minutes later (since starting this post) it’s all back to zero again.

This looks like a new addition. Google Maps’ Terrain View now has contour lines so you can see with better clarity which hills are steep and what the elevation is likely to be.

View Larger Map

Google’s new OpenSocial.org website is the front for the OpenSocial Foundation, an attempt to gather support for open development of OpenSocial-y issues such as data ownership and APIs.

Naturally, being the omnipotent creature that Google is, they’ve used their own Spreadsheet and newly-added survey feature to gather supporters (myself included).

Unfortunately, while the email address is hidden, it’s not gone completely. View the source of this page - a HTML output of the spreadsheet which appears on OpenSocial.org and behold: a listing of every email address submitted.

Fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, and came up with this estimation of what my life will look like (umm, certain estimates included…)

New API from Google allows you to create PNG charts from your data - very nice [via Google Operating System]

Google have just released Version 2 of their Google Maps Mobile, with the most obvious feature being the ability to locate the user even if they don’t have GPS - using the current Cell ID.

From the press release “[GPS technology] is supported on fewer than 15 percent of the mobile phones expected to be sold in 2007″

Go get it now, point your phone to google.com/gmm