Watching the keynote presentation of the last Google I/O conference two things sticked in my mind: The sentence “Never underestimate the web” and the fact that geolocation features are already available in modern browers. LocalBuzz is an Intuity lab project inspired by these two thoughts. It’s focused on mashing up geolocation features and the twitter API in order to create a new local news experience. (A little playground for testing and playing with emerging technologies).

You can test-drive it on our shiny and new Intuity Apps page.  Just fire up the LocalBuzz address in your iPhone Safari, Android Browser, Firefox 3.5 etc.

Let’s talk a little bit about the thoughts and ideas that led to sketching the application.

The story of LocalBuzz – From local news to augmented buzz

In ancient times local news were shared at places like markets etc. This way people stayed up to date with topics that were important to them in a hyperlocal context.

LocalBuzz is an approach to mimic this behaviour and augment it with modern technology. Just like the markets in ancient times it’s giving you access to local news (in this case twitter messages) that might be relevant as they’re related to your city, to your block.

Goals and ideas behind the app

• Play with the twitter API and its geolocation features
• Push the limits of web apps and show the potential of modern browsers in combination with HTML5 features
• Explore geolocation features of modern browsers (Firefox, Mobile Safari, Webkit)
• Experiment with seamless mobile integration of webapps (especially for iphone)
• Create a webapp that integrates seamlessly in different contexts (iPhone, Android, Desktop)

Seamless Mobile Integration – LocalBuzz on iPhone and Android

After adding to home screen the web-app appears just like a normal app without the safari URL bar

One important aspect of the lab project was to create a mobile application which behaves like a native app on smart phones like the iPhone. The latest version of Mobile Safari provides some great new features to support this. It uses the new meta tag “apple-mobile-web-app-capable” (see Safari HTML Reference or the LocalBuzz source code for details) so you can install LocalBuzz on your iPhone home screen to access local news with just one touch and without showing the Safari framework. On Android Phones you could install the bookmark to the app on your home screen as well.

What did we learn?

I’d like to share some insights that came to my mind while crafting the app and thinking about the future possibilities of the mobile web platform.

• Never underestimate the web
  The web platform is aldready capable of geo enabled services. A lot more interesting ideas and services will evolve around this functionality.
• The browser as a perfect RIA platform
  As more and more mobile devices (smart phone, netbooks, etc) arise and their browsers become powerful, modern web standars are a good starting point for creating a seamless user experience across multiple platforms.
• Build once, add device specific UX layer
  With the help of modern web standards you can style the core of your app in HTML and CSS. You can then add the Javascript User Experience which is specific to every plattform.

Standing on the shoulders of giants

To accomplish this project we used some great Open Source components in order to get the work done. So we’d like to give some shout outs and credits to the projects that luckily did all the hard work to create the building blocks of LocalBuzz:

• geo-location-javascript
  Simple platform agnostic Javascript API for location based services. Wraps geolocation APIs for iPhone, Android, Palm Pre etc.
• Mootools
  Great Javascript framework for building reusable webapps based on object-oriented principles. Mootools adds the interactivity to LocalBuzz and establishes the connection to twitter via JSON.
• Mootools Dotter by David Walsh
  We used this little handy component to build the progress indicator while loading search results.

Source available – Feel free to remix

Full source code of LocalBuzz is available under the GPL. So feel free to remix! Drop us a line if you feel inspired …