Yesterday, a bit more than three weeks after our initial public release, we released a new version of whereyougonnabe. In case you missed my earlier posts about whereyougonnabe, I'll briefly describe the system and what it strives to do:

whereyougonnabe is a web application (it is currently tied to Facebook, but in the near future we're going to take it outside of the Facebook environment, including a soon-to-be-released mobile-friendly version and integration with other social networking communities) that helps you meet your friends more often. Of course, that's just the tag line, so I'll go a bit deeper. Basically you tell our system where/when you are going to be in the future and we then analyze your "activity", compare it to the "activities" of your friends, and notify you of possible serendipitous moments. whereyougonnabe differentiates between local and global activities, allowing us to filter out some "interactions" while notifying you of "interactions" that we think you'll find of interest. And, on top of this, we use a granular spatial model to help us identify "interactions" - something that none of our competitors do very well. These things combined allow whereyougonnabe to do some really cool things.

With our initial release, we worked on building a solid foundation to support our core application. It took us about six months to get things to the point where we felt confident about releasing to the public (with a 1.0.0 release). Well, here we are three weeks later and we just released a new version (1.1.0). With this release, we are *finally getting to the point where we can start adding on some cool features (outside of the "core" functionality) that we think will make whereyougonnabe even more useful. Of course, in addition to adding new features, we've also enhanced some of the existing features and taken care of quite a few bugs. You can get the full details about this new release at whereyougonnabe's blog, but I'll list the highlights here:

• Full support for Safari - this was requested by quite a few of our users, so if you were holding back because you use Safari exclusively, you can now check whereyougonnabe out. We now support both Safari for Mac and Safari for Windows.
• Email notifications for new interactions - what good are new "interactions" that occur between you and your friends if you don't know about them? Well, we're taking care of this for you by sending a daily archive of any new interactions to you. Of course, if you don't have any new interactions we won't send you an email and you can always opt out of this service. We do, however, encourage you to stay subscribed, as we think that this feature will truly help you meet your friends more often.
• Better Facebook integration - we are now taking advantage of some of the integration points that Facebook gives us access to, including a new profile widget. If you're currently a user, the widget should show up on your profile the next time you use whereyougonnabe. If you're not yet a user, the widget will show up on your profile when you add our application and use it for the first time. We are also working on more integration points, including using Facebook's mini-feed and status features. Look for these features to be pushed out to whereyougonnabe in the very near future (likely by the end of this week).
• Usability improvements - we've improved whereyougonnabe's saved locations feature that allows you to re-use previously created activities. We now do a full-text search on your previously created activities, making it easier to create an activity within our system.
• General bug fixes - we've taken care of quite a few bugs, and improved our session handling in general - which we expect will make the system more stable. Some of these fixes will be more evident than others, but all of them should improve the overall experience of using whereyougonnabe.

There's lots more coming. We're currently focused on making it easier for whereyougonnabe's users to create activities, and should have some news on calendar integration (iCal, Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook) soon.

Here are some screenshots of the features discussed above:

Johannes Kebeck has an interesting post showing how to get the benefits of the MapPoint Web Service method, FindNearRoute, through the use of SQL Server 2008. He uses a newly-added feature of the Virtual Earth API that allows developers to gain access to a complete returned route-geometry when performing a route. This new feature, however, does require that the mapping application use customer identification (which, in turn, requires that you sign up for a Virtual Earth platform developer account).

If you haven't checked out Johannes' blog lately, you might want to give it a go now. He has written a whole slew of Virtual Earth and SQL Server 2008 posts lately, and there's a wealth of good information there.

We've already started using SQL Server 2008 in some of our development applications, and are planning on taking advantage of ArcSDE 9.3's ability to utilize SQL Server 2008's spatial data types. We're hoping that by doing this, we'll be able to offer access to our geometries through both traditional GIS tools (ArcGIS Desktop for our shop) and web services (ADO.Net Data Services returning JSON and XML and other services built on top of WCF). As we're already using ArcGIS Server 9.3's REST capabilities from within our JavaScript/Virtual Earth applications, if we can "close the circle" by tying SQL Server 2008 and Virtual Earth together in a robust and meaningful way, we may just be able to hit the proverbial bulls-eye. We've already written quite a bit of code that brings these technologies together, but are still deciding on the best overall approach.

One thing that is still unclear to me is if we're going to utilize ESRI's tools heavily or try to avoid them as much as possible and stick with all of the non-ESRI .NET technologies. In a lot of ways, we're already going the latter route (saying ArcGIS Server 9.2 still leaves a bad taste in my mouth), but I've been impressed with ArcGIS Server 9.3 so far, so I'm withholding judgement until we see how the new set of technologies perform in a couple of months.

And from the Microsoft camp, I expect that more direct integration with SQL Server 2008 will be coming soon to the Virtual Earth API. I haven't, however, heard of any solid dates yet. Any integration will be much-welcomed, as it will save us precious development time.

Whichever route we decide to take, it's pretty obvious that now is a great time to be working in web mapping. Especially if you're able to take advantage of all the integration points available through .NET.