Friday, March 7. 2008
Geotargeting in forms
I have a love hate relationship with geo-targeting. The web wasn't designed with making it easy to get the geographical location of connected computers in mind. A users geographical location is interesting and potentially valuable though and so methods have been developed to make it (almost) possible.
These methods typically involve something akin to a brute force attack. Figure out where enough IP addresses have been assigned and you can get a good idea of where a user is from their IP address. Other methods involve identifying the computers through which they are communicating with you and assuming the user is in the surrounding geographical area. Neither method is perfect but in the majority of cases you can know which country a user is in with reasonable accuracy.
What I hate about geo-targeting is how some sites think they can locate you more accurately than the country you are in. Maxmind, which is probably the commercial leader, thinks it can guess your location to your nearest city with an accuracy of 81% in the US. Outside of the US I suspect this drops considerably. I'm seeing fewer sites than I once did trying to tell me where I'm connecting to the internet from (and getting it wrong) so I'll skip forward to what I love about geo-targeting.
These methods typically involve something akin to a brute force attack. Figure out where enough IP addresses have been assigned and you can get a good idea of where a user is from their IP address. Other methods involve identifying the computers through which they are communicating with you and assuming the user is in the surrounding geographical area. Neither method is perfect but in the majority of cases you can know which country a user is in with reasonable accuracy.
What I hate about geo-targeting is how some sites think they can locate you more accurately than the country you are in. Maxmind, which is probably the commercial leader, thinks it can guess your location to your nearest city with an accuracy of 81% in the US. Outside of the US I suspect this drops considerably. I'm seeing fewer sites than I once did trying to tell me where I'm connecting to the internet from (and getting it wrong) so I'll skip forward to what I love about geo-targeting.
Used properly geo-targeting can make our lives as users that little bit simpler. I love simple.
After recently being reminded about eve-online I decided to sign up and give it a go. I think eve-online is moving in a nice direction with their use of geo-targeting. Take a look at the following screenshot.
That is how the form appears before I enter any info. The country is pre-selected saving me from having to scroll down to the bottom of the drop-down menu or start typing. I like this. It's subtle and simple and best of all lets me be lazy.
Sadly it is downhill from here. Whatever database they are using thinks I'm located in London. In fact I'm located in Edinburgh. It gets worse though. I can forgive a little unjustified confidence in their geo-targeting but how, if you know my country, can the time zone assigned be on the opposite side of the planet? That is not a mistake. That is laziness.
As developers if we are going to go to the trouble of trying to figure out the country of origin of someone then it isn't really much of a stretch to go from there to the time zone. We also have a far better chance of getting that right than the city.
After recently being reminded about eve-online I decided to sign up and give it a go. I think eve-online is moving in a nice direction with their use of geo-targeting. Take a look at the following screenshot.
That is how the form appears before I enter any info. The country is pre-selected saving me from having to scroll down to the bottom of the drop-down menu or start typing. I like this. It's subtle and simple and best of all lets me be lazy.
Sadly it is downhill from here. Whatever database they are using thinks I'm located in London. In fact I'm located in Edinburgh. It gets worse though. I can forgive a little unjustified confidence in their geo-targeting but how, if you know my country, can the time zone assigned be on the opposite side of the planet? That is not a mistake. That is laziness.
As developers if we are going to go to the trouble of trying to figure out the country of origin of someone then it isn't really much of a stretch to go from there to the time zone. We also have a far better chance of getting that right than the city.
I've recently been playing around with geoip databases looking at implementing the type of timezone prediction I previously discussed. I'll be writing a blog post to cover that in the next week or so but first wanted to mention something which has been p
Tracked: May 01, 17:16
Following my initial discussion on using geo-targeting to predict timezones I've finally found time to play around with some of these ideas. The idea Simplify the user experience by predicting the timezone someone is in and auto-populating a registr
Tracked: May 05, 11:39