After the craziness last week (Where 2.0, WhereCamp, and a GAE Hackathon in between), I was looking forward to taking a breather, but have instead jumped headlong into working on some much delayed music hacking and getting serious (along with self-imposed deadlines) with the Objective-C area. I’m also catching up on publishing stuff from last week, so here’s the summary of my Bluetooth work.

As Brady mentioned in his Radar writeup, Blueball came primarily out of discussions on how to do an interesting Fireball-like service/tool for a single-track, stuck-in-the-middle-of-nowhere (sorry Burlingame) conference. Also, my desire for Brady to say “blueball” on stage. (score!) Fireball and Blueball are also both parts of a larger track that I’m exploring. It may take a while, but hopefully something interesting will start emerging.

I had a session on Proximity and Relative Location at WhereCamp, where I stepped through my code (really simple collectors, very half-assed visualizations running a simple spring graph) and talked a bit about the useful things that can be done with this sort of sensing.

The particularly interesting bits (IMO) are in applying the type of thinking that was being done on Bluetooth scatternets a few years back on patching together “piconets.” That is, by stitching together the partial meshes, you can get very pull out all sorts of transitive (inferred) properties. There are of course visualizations and pattern extraction you can do on that, but by matching the relative with the absolutes, you can get far wider coverage for LBS and related services. And of course, you can do your own reality mining on social connections when you start relating devices to people.

blueball v1 from lhl on Vimeo.