One feature of XMPP clients which receives less attention than it deserves is the ability to send the current Location of the user, as defined in the XEP-0080: User Location feature.
If you are using, say, the Conversations client (or derivatives such as Snikket), you can attach (with the paperclip icon at the top of the screen), your current location to a message.
The recipient (or recipients for a group chat), receive a message with button to ‘Show Location’ and clicking on that will open a map showing where the sender it.
Uses
The ability to easily send an unambiguous location, without needing to know where you are yourself has many uses – some attempted to be covered by workarounds like What3words, Mapcode and other Geocoding systems.
Such systems require that your phone runs an app which can determine your location (i.e. your current latitude and longitude) and convert it to something more convenient to be send by speech, or possibly as a text message. If you already have an app which can transmit your location, and also chat, send photos and videos etc, then it is simpler to use that.
Family and Friends
When meeting up with friends in a place you do not know, it is very handy to be able to send your location quickly and easily.
Breakdown services
Many breakdown services can see the benefits to them of a App, which can send their clients location, but having an app which only does one thing, and which you hope not to use is a poor use of your phone’s resources. If they had an XMPP contact point – say ‘help@rescueservice.example.com’ – then clients could use that to provide information on where they are, as well as further information on the problem.
Reporting Potholes, Fly tipping …
There are many situations where an accurate location report would be useful, as well as the ability to send a picture. Councils could use a set of XMPP accounts, e.g. pothole@oxfordshire.gov.uk for
Tour groups
Organised tours, particularly those where not all the group members will be together all the time, could benefit from the ability for the group leader to send a message saying ‘I am here’ – at some convenient meeting point – and message to ask member to be there in half an hour. By running their own server they could create temporary (or not) client accounts for group member who do not have an account, and add everybody on that tour to a Group Chat
Where are you?
A possible XMPP extension would be a standard way to ask the client program for a location report. Depending on the source of the query this could result in
- The user being asked if they want to send the location, or decline to send it (which would send a reply indicating this) or ignore the query
- The device sending, declining or ignoring, depending on what it had been told to to.