Moz Stumbler and Mozilla location services

I learnt about this new thing back in the Mozilla Summit, a little more than a week away.

The project goals are better detailed in their site and the wiki, but basically they aim to determine if it's feasible to provide location service data, which is something only a "privileged few" can do right now.

At this stage the project needs real data to start with, and so they've got a very simple app for collecting it, called MozStumbler, and a leaderboard to encourage you to "compete" and gather more data. There are some stats too.

moz stumbler app

This is totally experimental, and, as they said, "not as pretty as Ingress... yet", but if you want to contribute you just need to download the MozStumbler app and start walking around. Then press "Stop" to upload when you're done. A word of warning: since this is super beta, make sure you've got a data connection when you press Stop or you might not get your data uploaded :-P

The map shows pretty sparse regions, so what about each one of you join in and help fill in the gaps? :-)

moz stumbler map

Or you could also join in and help with some Android code!

Update: Forgot to mention that there's also an API you can access. So the data comes in, but it can also come out :-)

I might be weird but I find this project quite enjoyable. There's a certain thrill about walking around and seeing the number of scanned locations and wi-fi access points grow...