pb
Jan 17, 2011
10:11 AM

We've already been doing this on iPhones for years, and we haven't yet found a good way to use the data. We thought exactly the same thing you did—that we would eventually come up with some interesting statistics. But we haven't found the compelling argument for it yet.

We're still gathering the data for those who want to participate. (You get a prompt when adding a fuel-up if you'd like to send your location to Fuelly.) But we're not sure we're going to keep asking for that data. It's a slight annoyance to click that participation prompt each time, and we're not doing anything with the data.

Ah I was going to ask if my iPhone does send it when I hit yes. Lol.

Interesting to hear it's already being done! But only on iPhone, not on Android or other mobile browsers? I just tried spoofing the iPhone's user-agent string and visiting m.fuelly.com, and didn't get any location-awareness pop-up...

One use that I just thought of involves correlating MPG changes with temperature changes, to try and figure out how much worse fuel efficiency *really* is in the winter?

pb
Jan 18, 2011
1:58 PM

It could be that your device doesn't support navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition. We serve it on the new fuel-up page if the user-agent contains "iPhone".

Like I said, we're considering turning that off so I'm not sure it makes sense to expand it to other user-agents. We'll give it some more thought. I think there could be some interesting data points to pull out, but fuel economy is fairly complex with dozens of contributing factors. I'm not sure lon/lat + MPG is enough to find meaningful stats.

Might be nice to see my price/gallon based on where I fill up. I'm also about to drive from San Francisco to Toronto and it would be nice for Fuelly to track where I'm filling up automatically.

o13102
Jan 23, 2011
3:51 PM

The only way I could see the data being useful is if you had a database that mapped GPS coordinates to actual gas stations. Then you could compile a list of gas stations with the current price.

pb
Jan 24, 2011
11:32 AM

Yeah, that would be interesting. Unfortunately I don't know of any service where you can send a lon/lat and get back a business that's at those coordinates.

Gas Buddy does gas prices in the US, and I bet they have a database like this. But it's a key part of their business so probably not something they want to open up to the world. Maybe a partnership with someone like Gas Buddy would work—they'd get lots of new gas price reporters that way.

pb, I agree that it sounds like a pretty natural, useful, and mutually beneficial idea to partner with GasBuddy :)

It would be nice if I could enter the brand of petrol or the name of the petrol station, then the next time I filled up at the same GPS location it would default to the same brand. That way, I could see if different brands of petrol gave me different MPG.

I would just be happy to be able to click on a fill-up and see where on a map it took place. What if I got better mileage during one particular fill-up cycle and I really want to know where it was that I got the gas from. The map data is already there. I don't need you to display the business, because in my area I already know what gas stations are where. Just the location of the fillup would be great. I would even settle for the lat/long to be in the fill-up detail table. Can't you just drop the lat/long data on a map for the fill-up details?

pb
Mar 16, 2011
8:36 AM

Our concern with showing the fuel-up locations on the site is privacy. Everything at Fuelly is public. There's no ambiguity that way. What you put on the site can be seen by everyone.

Since location data is gathered passively—users have to agree to it, but they don't type the data in themselves—it falls in a different category. Putting that data out for everyone to see is something we'll have to think about very carefully.