I attended the Web 2.0 Mapping Meetup last night. It is really a great venue for the hottest Web 2.0 Mapping companies to present their latest and greatest. For proof of this, Geogad presented its latest benefit to travelers, its ability to mix and match content so that travelers can build their own custom tours.

But last night’s companies were a little weak for my tastes. One of the companies has given virtually the same presentation at Location 2.0 a week or so before. Another company was Yahoo presenting FireEagle. The problem is that I had seen the FireEagle presentation at the beginning of the summer. The only new piece to their presentation was a partnership that they had with a mobile hardware vendor. This vendor sold a wireless communication device that you could use to precisely give you position to fire and rescue if you were hiking in a remote area and needed help. Nice but of limited value to city people. I had really expected to see more progress from FireEagle after all these months. The problem is mentioned as a feature by the speaker. Yahoo created FireEagle for third party developers to create value for this product. Companies see no reason to pay their own people to develop this value themselves.

The only company that had anything new was Abaqus. With their service you can post your geotrack logs to the web. You can also include text, photos and videos. The only problem was that there was no clear revenue stream. It is an interesting service, but I cannot imagine that I would ever personally have a need for this much info on my movements. It may be more compelling for companies that need to keep track of employees. But I still can’t see why such a company would want to post this information to the web.