Cool thought exercise, Ty. I definitely agree with the suggestions to eliminate or otherwise compress the oceans.

Here's another suggestion for optimization: you don't need the same accuracy in wide-open spaces that you do in dense, urban ones. While it might be useful to locate someone within a meter in New York, Toyko, or Beijing, there are vast areas of the globe, including the oceans, Saskatchewan, the Arctic circles, Mongolia/Siberia, to name a few, where you don't need that level of precision. A square kilometer (one millionth the precision) or even 10 square kilometers (one ten-millionth) might be sufficient. Maybe there's a way to model a grid that is denser in populated areas than in unpopulated ones? This may make the translation to GPS a bit more complicated but might save you quite a bit of information storage.

Signal processing and data compression is fun and fascinating stuff - I have a BBN/Harvard/MIT friend who does this for a living -- I'll ask her to take a look at this article.

From http://tofind.me/+FF1V1IS
-Peyton

* By the way, the link took me to Saskatchewan too.

I could be missing the point here, but I just used http://is.gd to compress my location as grabbed from Google Maps and am getting very, very tiny URLs, even shorter than tofind.me does. As an exercise in "how would I do this" it is an interesting project, but for the end-user point of view, being able to make a url that is readable over the phone (or turned into a tiny QR code for a business card?), I wonder a bit if this isn't a solution in search of a problem.

Your website, encoding San Francisco, CA
http://ToFind.Me/+DBL6XWBJH

URL shortening of standard Google Map URL, exact same address
http://is.gd/jm5Ws

But, in the spirit of thinking about the problem, I think if we look at the characters as raw strings of bits, we'll find we can encode quite a lot for a table look up in a database using just a few characters. A pre-built table could likely contain even shorter URLs, as we are concerned with only one domain of data: geo coordinates.

However, even just thinking about a one-for-one encoding of latitude and longitude, if we consider that 4 bits can hold the entire 10 digit space (plus extra... perhaps that space could be used for something), we can imagine that a single UTF-16 character could hold a 4 digit number, more than enough for a latitude plus .1 precision. Add a second character and with 32 bits we can encode xxx.xxxxx precision in two characters. Do that for both lat and longitude and we get 4 characters encoding any point on the globe with 5 decimal point precision. Add one more character and allow the lat and long to share some bit space within a single character and you'll gain 7 decimal precision.

With UTF-8 encoding, we have to be more sly in thinking about how best to maximize the bit usage. Still though, a single 8-bit ASCII character would effectively hold two digits of information, so if Wolfram Alpha gave you a base 62 digit that was 9 digits long and each digit can be represented by 4 bits, then at 5 characters we still have the possibility to encode every square meter on the planet. Going back to the UTF-16 character set, we could get it down to three characters... two if we are willing to lose precision... but there's still no guarantee those characters would be human readable.

Im not sure if you made some changes recently or not but the links to map locations you have there are somewhere in northern Canada. Also, when I try and go directly to the website without a /something at the end, nothing loads but a grey box and a green box. However, when I follow your link everything loads just fine.

Interesting solution to common problem. This is a problem that my friend and I set out to solve also. We took a somewhat different approach and enabled real-time tracking of friends also using google maps api. Check it out at mobileply.com. This is a little more robust and has some of the features I think you were looking to implement. I do love the simplicity of your idea though.

Cool idea! I just tried it and +remkjuka, it tell me is closest to Bylot Island, Baffin, Unorganized, NU, Canada.

And no map is showing. Tried it both in Chrome and Firefox on Ubuntu 10.

Saw this a few days ago and thought it was cool.

Was just browsing the internet and saw the following links:

rhok.org/ShortCoords
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georef

The first one is more of a call for help (get in touch?!). Georef seems to be very similar to your proposal!

This sounds a great idea - sadly all I get when I go to the site is a blank grey page?

Angela - I missed it too at first, but it's in the fact that the URL is shortened to a point where you can easily communicate it.

Pretty awesome idea. Like the first commenter said though, the problem is getting people to ultimately adopt GPS. Till then, the nearest address is a nice workaround, if it is in fact accurate for the most part - it would be helpful to list the distance of the nearest address to your exact GPS coordinates, by measuring the distance between the two GPS coordinates

@Alice - His mother is very proud!

If I were your mother I would be so proud of you!

Thanks, guys. The problem is that there's now no benefit to reducing it unless I can reduce it to 1/62nd of its size (otherwise I'm only affecting the range of the first character, not the length of the string)