- Joined
- Sep 23, 2002
- RO Number
- 10265
- Messages
- 9,958
I think it will be cool if we all do this.
I have an account.
>>> Locations, Locations, Locations >>>
Today is the start of an important new capability for the cruising
community - Locations. We've talked about it many times. The very first
release of capabilities is live now. It's the very, very beginning of
functionality and is mainly being opened to test the privacy and
performance before opening it up to automatic GPS location tracking.
Being able to store and display a boat's location is pretty easy. There
are numerous websites doing that for AIS and custom hardware tracking
today. What's missing has been the ability to merge a boat's location
through multiple privacy settings and against the owner's list of
friends and group memberships. And even that's not difficult. The
really difficult thing is doing all of that efficiently so hundreds of
thousands of boats can be handled at the same time.
There have been months of software development put into Locations. A
tremendous amount of database development was done to allow this to
work given the growth that's coming. Database joining, caching, and
efficient capabilities for offline use have all been completed and
tested on our development server.
We now need your help.
We need you to test Locations on the eBoatCards server before we allow
it to automatically collect live GPS data. Automatic collection is
where security and privacy are much more important. We're also
collecting extensive logging of the performance to make sure we're
ready for a few hundred thousand boats in the system, all updating
their location automatically.
Here's what we need you to do:
1. Log onto eBoatCards.com. If you don't have an account, log in with
your ActiveCaptain email/password and walk through the process of
creating your electronic boat card.
2. Review Account / Privacy Settings in the upper right corner. Decide
how you would like your location information to be shared:
Allow friends to see my location:
This setting determines if the friends you have approved are allowed to
see your location when they view your card or through other methods
coming that will show your location in other products.
Allow Sponsors to see my location:
This setting determines if Sponsor marinas and boatyards are allowed
to see your location. Sponsors are only approved by us. Allowing
Sponsors to see your location will provide possible special offer
capabilities that are coming in the future.
Allow any member within 5 nm to see my location:
This setting allows other members who are near you to see your
location in future navigation products. It is valuable for others who
are not your friends (yet) to know who you are as you arrive near them.
A non-friend can only see your profile picture, boat name, hailing
port, and owner's names which is not much different from looking up a
boat name on a documentation database when they physically can see your
boat.
If you make any changes to your Account Privacy settings, you must
select the Save Changes button at the bottom to record the changes.
3. Review the Group Privacy item for every group you belong to:
For each group, you can decide if members of that group are allowed
to see your location. Unless they are also your friend in eBoatCards,
they'll only see limited information about you but they'll be able to
see your location based on this group privacy setting.
If you make any changes to your Group Privacy settings, you must
select the Update button at the bottom to record the changes.
Make sure to visit every group you are a member of to set the Group
Privacy for each group. By default, sharing your location to group
members if off so you must turn it on for others in your groups to
see your location.
4. Go to your eBoatCard and select Locations from the menu on the left
(it's below Friends). This page allows you to "Set My Location" and
later "Clear My Location". You set your location manually right now
by dragging the blue pin and selecting "Submit Location".
Clicking Clear My Location removes your location from your card as well
as in all other places that display your location. It's the quickest
way to remove your current location from everywhere.
Once you've set your location, the privacy settings take over allowing
others access to your location information. Tell your friends to manually
set their location and then examine their eBoatCard to see where they
are. You can also go into any group and select Locations. That shows a
map where all group members are currently located based on their group
privacy permissions for the group. Your location will be the red pin.
Other group members will be green pins.
Clicking on a pin will show the member's boat name, how the data was
obtained, and the age of the data. Their boat name is a link that will
display their eBoatCard when clicked.
Remember that this is at the beginning and it will take a few days for
boaters to enter their location before the group displays will come
alive and become useful. Tell other group members to update their
personal location too.
We need a lot of real data to test the performance and get an initial
database of real locations spread across many groups. This is just the
beginning. It obviously becomes much more useful when GPS data is
feeding into the same mechanism in an automated way. Even when that
is released, this manual way to set your position will always be
available to you to let the community know where you are located.
Today is the first day of Locations. There are many more capabilities
with Locations coming but we need to make sure everything is solid
before releasing more.
>>> eBoatCards Searching >>>
We have many lists of feature additions we want to add to eBoatCards.
As long as Locations was being added, we also started messing around
with the search capability because it was terrible. It was initially
written to just search for any word in the phrase entered. That's a
very simple way to implement searching but it isn't user friendly. In
fact, it's user hostile because it generates too many unrelated hits.
General search and group search have been expanded to search for
multiple words as a phrase first. It will then use the individual words
to assist in finding an object. This should make searching much more
effective and provide the results you're looking for.
Searching is more complex than it seems because there are multiple
databases being accessed to perform the search. Most of the new search
capability has been installed. There are some additional changes going
in through the week to complete this important feature.
There is much more coming with eBoatCards. Stay tuned for the new
database capabilities coming to groups!
I have an account.
>>> Locations, Locations, Locations >>>
Today is the start of an important new capability for the cruising
community - Locations. We've talked about it many times. The very first
release of capabilities is live now. It's the very, very beginning of
functionality and is mainly being opened to test the privacy and
performance before opening it up to automatic GPS location tracking.
Being able to store and display a boat's location is pretty easy. There
are numerous websites doing that for AIS and custom hardware tracking
today. What's missing has been the ability to merge a boat's location
through multiple privacy settings and against the owner's list of
friends and group memberships. And even that's not difficult. The
really difficult thing is doing all of that efficiently so hundreds of
thousands of boats can be handled at the same time.
There have been months of software development put into Locations. A
tremendous amount of database development was done to allow this to
work given the growth that's coming. Database joining, caching, and
efficient capabilities for offline use have all been completed and
tested on our development server.
We now need your help.
We need you to test Locations on the eBoatCards server before we allow
it to automatically collect live GPS data. Automatic collection is
where security and privacy are much more important. We're also
collecting extensive logging of the performance to make sure we're
ready for a few hundred thousand boats in the system, all updating
their location automatically.
Here's what we need you to do:
1. Log onto eBoatCards.com. If you don't have an account, log in with
your ActiveCaptain email/password and walk through the process of
creating your electronic boat card.
2. Review Account / Privacy Settings in the upper right corner. Decide
how you would like your location information to be shared:
Allow friends to see my location:
This setting determines if the friends you have approved are allowed to
see your location when they view your card or through other methods
coming that will show your location in other products.
Allow Sponsors to see my location:
This setting determines if Sponsor marinas and boatyards are allowed
to see your location. Sponsors are only approved by us. Allowing
Sponsors to see your location will provide possible special offer
capabilities that are coming in the future.
Allow any member within 5 nm to see my location:
This setting allows other members who are near you to see your
location in future navigation products. It is valuable for others who
are not your friends (yet) to know who you are as you arrive near them.
A non-friend can only see your profile picture, boat name, hailing
port, and owner's names which is not much different from looking up a
boat name on a documentation database when they physically can see your
boat.
If you make any changes to your Account Privacy settings, you must
select the Save Changes button at the bottom to record the changes.
3. Review the Group Privacy item for every group you belong to:
For each group, you can decide if members of that group are allowed
to see your location. Unless they are also your friend in eBoatCards,
they'll only see limited information about you but they'll be able to
see your location based on this group privacy setting.
If you make any changes to your Group Privacy settings, you must
select the Update button at the bottom to record the changes.
Make sure to visit every group you are a member of to set the Group
Privacy for each group. By default, sharing your location to group
members if off so you must turn it on for others in your groups to
see your location.
4. Go to your eBoatCard and select Locations from the menu on the left
(it's below Friends). This page allows you to "Set My Location" and
later "Clear My Location". You set your location manually right now
by dragging the blue pin and selecting "Submit Location".
Clicking Clear My Location removes your location from your card as well
as in all other places that display your location. It's the quickest
way to remove your current location from everywhere.
Once you've set your location, the privacy settings take over allowing
others access to your location information. Tell your friends to manually
set their location and then examine their eBoatCard to see where they
are. You can also go into any group and select Locations. That shows a
map where all group members are currently located based on their group
privacy permissions for the group. Your location will be the red pin.
Other group members will be green pins.
Clicking on a pin will show the member's boat name, how the data was
obtained, and the age of the data. Their boat name is a link that will
display their eBoatCard when clicked.
Remember that this is at the beginning and it will take a few days for
boaters to enter their location before the group displays will come
alive and become useful. Tell other group members to update their
personal location too.
We need a lot of real data to test the performance and get an initial
database of real locations spread across many groups. This is just the
beginning. It obviously becomes much more useful when GPS data is
feeding into the same mechanism in an automated way. Even when that
is released, this manual way to set your position will always be
available to you to let the community know where you are located.
Today is the first day of Locations. There are many more capabilities
with Locations coming but we need to make sure everything is solid
before releasing more.
>>> eBoatCards Searching >>>
We have many lists of feature additions we want to add to eBoatCards.
As long as Locations was being added, we also started messing around
with the search capability because it was terrible. It was initially
written to just search for any word in the phrase entered. That's a
very simple way to implement searching but it isn't user friendly. In
fact, it's user hostile because it generates too many unrelated hits.
General search and group search have been expanded to search for
multiple words as a phrase first. It will then use the individual words
to assist in finding an object. This should make searching much more
effective and provide the results you're looking for.
Searching is more complex than it seems because there are multiple
databases being accessed to perform the search. Most of the new search
capability has been installed. There are some additional changes going
in through the week to complete this important feature.
There is much more coming with eBoatCards. Stay tuned for the new
database capabilities coming to groups!