大象传媒

Our prototype has now been live for just over 2 months (this post to find out more) and we've just rolled out a small upgrade to the site. The new features aren't groundbreaking but we'd like to know what you think.

As part of his 10% time, has very kindly added support to Radio Pop. Fire Eagle is a location-broker service from Yahoo that consumes and provides location data in a secure way. Now from your Settings tab in Radio Pop you can authorise Radio Pop to set and get location data from Fire Eagle. At the moment the support is very basic - once you've authorised Radio Pop and Fire Eagle to work together then your Friends page will indicate whether any of your friends are nearby, assuming they've also activated Fire Eagle - look for the map pin icon. It is just looking for whether they are in the same city as you and displays no more information than that. We don't do anything else with the data and we never display your exact location to anybody. The Settings tab also has a textfield for you to easily send your current location to Fire Eagle.

That's quite basic functionality at the moment but we've had other ideas such as storing the location alongside each of your Listens or showing the geographical distribution of listeners to particular radio networks. What would you like to use the Radio Fire Pop Eagle for?

The other features to be added in this release are also simple additions to the page. When you're signed in then that page now shows a list of other users you might know. It's basically friends-of-friends who have at least two of your current friends in common. And it also shows whether any of your friends are listening right now - just hover over the headphone-wearing friend icon to see what they're listening to.

We're not going to be doing a huge amount of work on improving Radio Pop in the future but I know a few of you are regularly using it so we will be keeping it going for the time being. The reason for this is that there are some really exciting projects happening around the 大象传媒 right now which should let you do most of the things that Radio Pop does, but integrated properly into bbc.co.uk. The R&D team is now starting work on our next project and you can expect to see a new prototype sometime early in the new year - all I can say is that it's got something to do with gaming and with instant messaging.