I blogged recently about the W3C Geolocation API which is progressing through the W3C standards process.
Google Maps is using this API as of last week to identify your location. When you bring up Google Maps, you’ll see a button in the navigation widget. The first time you click on it, you will have the option to enable the Google Maps My Location feature. If you do enable it, then by simply clicking on the button, Google will centre the map on what it thinks your location is.
As Adena Schutzberg points out in a blog, the API is not computing your location but using the preferred “location provider” set by the platform, which could be a GPS, wi-fi interpolation or some other method of estimating your location. This is the location returned by the API to the calling application. Apparently Firefox, Chrome and Gears use Google Location Services as the default geolocation provider.
So in my case, I am in the Autodesk office in Ottawa, Canada, but the Geolocation API appears to be returning the location of the Autodesk server in Manchester, NH.
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