Category — projects

WHEREAMI is a mobile application that accepts a username as input, searches public profiles on various location-aware services, and returns the user’s last known location via text message.

Just text 41411 with whereami <username>, where <username> is a username that you or someone you know is likely to use.

For example, if you text whereami hmason to 41411, you’ll see a response much like the image to the left.

This app works on the principle that people tend to use the same username for many applications. The WHEREAMI script will search through a variety of web services for a result for that username. All of the information is public and available without logging in.

Right now, the script will search Brightkite, then Dopplr, and finally Twitter. If you know of another site with public user location information, please comment below and I’ll add it!

Open tab count extension in the status bar

How many tabs do you have open in your browser right now?

Did you have to count manually? Are you using Firefox? Try the open tab count extension!

I created this extension because I wanted to explore memory management in browser tabs, and I was curious about the Firefox extension architecture. I’m not quite as eager to explore memory hacks in Firefox now that Google Chrome is out and handles that issue natively, but I’m still using this extension to monitor my tab (over)usage.

The extension puts a small icon in the status bar alongside the number of open tabs. If more than one window is open, the extension shows the number of open tabs in the current window / the total number of open tabs.

Please let me know below if you have any comments!

Update: An update has been submitted to Mozilla that supports Firefox 3.5, and it’ll show up on the official extension page once it’s been approved.

The new version of the InfoFez launches on April 7th… be there!