It appears that I’ve committed a deadly blogging sin by not posting for a whole month, after starting with an average of one post per week. Hopefully my tweetings have provided the reassurance that I’m alive and well.

So, what’s up?

I spent some time working and playing in the United States – including my first Thanksgiving with my girlfriend’s family in sunny Florida. Throughout I’ve been hard at work developing the next phase of Total Hotspots. It’s been both a busy and fun month!

What’s new?

I can only reveal the general direction of developments at this stage and will provide details on specific features in the next couple of weeks.

To help explain the rationale for these changes, let’s briefly step back to when Total Hotspots launched in 2004. To a time when mass adoption and acceptance of social media was at an early stage. I recall a Total Hotspots requirements session in which we questioned how motivated members of the community would be to contribute feedback about their experiences with pubic wi-fi. The goal of the first version was to make it simple to for individuals for find hotspots. In 2005 MyHotspots was launched, enabling favourite searches and locations to be saved in member profiles; along with location ratings and reviews.

We underestimated the level to which people would be comfortable sharing information. For example, when you add a location to your favourites, it shouldn’t just remain in your profile as a personal bookmark – it should be visible and available for the benefit of others in the community.

Improving the presentation of user generated content has been the motivation behind the majority of design decisions. There’s less point in writing comments about hotspot locations (or anything for that matter), whilst these comments are buried three stacks deep in one of over 150k records. THS has been restructured to ensure user generated content flows higher up the stack, and that quality user contributions get the exposure it deserve.

My vision is for the Total Hotspots community to benefit from interacting with each other in new ways, making it easier to find the best hotspots by connecting with people just like you.

The user interface has also been catapulted into 2009, including improved mapping and shiny ajax goodness!

API coming shortly after…

Finally, shortly after the new totalhotspots.com goes live, a new Total Hotspots API will also be available; enabling a whole host of new applications to integrate hotspot search features! In the past, third parties that integrated Total Hotspots data with their services usually received monthly updates. Using the API, updates should be available as soon as the website is updated, making it simpler for third parties to gain access to the most recent data without the hassle of managing a manual feed.

I’m really excited by the creative opportunity the API provides for creating mash-ups with other useful services. At this stage, I can’t confirm any commercial details, however if you’re involved in a service that could benefit from the hotspots API, or have any cool ideas, then let’s talk!

New mobile hotspot locator.

Back in 2004 Total Hotspots launched a location-aware SMS hotspot locator. The main issue with creating location-based services had always been the cost charged by the network operators for performing a location lookup using cell ID (a unique number assigned to each cell tower), leading to an expensive per-request fee for the end user – especially considering the limited capabilities of SMS and WAP. Despite arousing media interest, there wasn’t enough usage, leading to the mobile service being pulled about a year later.

Fortunately the world has now changed and we’ve gone back to the drawing board. Location is now pretty much a commodity, with new handsets usually providing free access to location information derived from a number of different location provides, including GPS, Cell ID, WPS (Wi-Fi Positioning System) and good old fashioned IP address. I can’t go into further detail at this stage, but can say that I’m really excited that we’ll be launching a new mobile app early in 2009! Watch this space.