For six months, between October 2013 and April 2014, I walked around Charlottetown with my iPad in my pack running the Moves location-tracking application in the background. It was, and remains, an elegant app, and a great, simple way to track “moving around,” whether by foot, bicycle or otherwise. Alas Moves was acquired by Facebook at the end of April, and I just couldn’t conscience the idea of constantly telling Facebook my whereabouts, so I uninstalled the app and cancelled my account.

Before I did so, however, I requested an archive of my data, and, to the credit of Moves’ developers, what I received in return was an elegantly-structured data dump of everything in formats ranging from iCal to GeoJSON. I took one of the GeoJSON files provided – a record of all of my Moves “activities” over that six months, and loaded into Quantum GIS and the result was a rather accurate (and beautiful) picture of my day to day life in Charlottetown:

MOVES map from October 2013 to April 2014

Between Moves and Foursquare and Plazes and Twitter and Flickr and the late Google Latitude and all of the other applications I run that leave a geotrace, I have almost a decade’s worth of my geolocation archived away in various formats; one of the items on my Hacker in Residence to-do list is to develop a unified visualization tool for all that data so that I can fly through time and explore my whens and wheres.

Peter Rukavina

Add new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Plain text

  • Allowed HTML tags: <b> <i> <em> <strong> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

About This Blog

Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

To learn more about me, read my /now, look at my bio, listen to audio I’ve posted, read presentations and speeches I’ve written, see things I’ve favourited elsewhere, or get in touch (peter@rukavina.net is the quickest way).

I have been writing here since May 1999: you can explore the 25+ years of blog posts in the archive.

You can subscribe to an RSS feed of posts, an RSS feed of comments, an RSS feed of favourites elsewhere, or a podcast RSS feed that just contains audio posts. You can also receive a daily digests of posts by email. I also publish an OPML blogroll.

InstagramYouTubeVimeoORCIDOpenStreetMapInternet ArchivePEI.artDrupalGithub.