EveryTrail saves your favorite hikes, runs, walks, and flights
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MapMyRun is a trail saver exclusively for runners
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Several very interesting location-recording Web sites are online right now, such as Platial, 43 Places, Wayfaring, and Flagr. They all record locations and let you tell a story about them. EveryTrail, a new site in early development, adds a wrinkle: It will record your path between waypoints, not just the stops you make.

Why would you want this? To record a favorite hike or bike ride, perhaps. This site lets you share your route with others, for those trips where the point is the journey itself.

EveryTrail requires that you have a way to record your movements, of course. You'll need a recording GPS device--a hiker's gizmo like this Garmin, a GPS watch, an airplane navigation system, or perhaps a GPS-equipped phone. And you'll need to download an app from the EveryTrail site, which can then take your GPS data and transfer it. I don't have a suitable device, so I was not able to test this.

Once you have uploaded your trail, you can add placemarks, notes, and photos. The photos feature, in particular, is very cool: The service correlates the time stamps on your photos with your GPS trail and automatically places photos along your route (if your camera's time is set incorrectly, you only have to tell EveryTrail where one particular photo was taken, and it will calculate the positions for all the rest).

You can see your trails on the site's Google Maps mashup page (EveryTrail also includes a topographical map option, a nice bonus), or on Google Earth. You can also upload the trail to another portable GPS device. There's still no good way to print the trail, though, which is kind of a bummer, because being able to output your path overlaid on a topo map could be extremely useful.

While I was watching the EveryTrail presentation at the New Tech Meetup last night, the fellow sitting next to me said to me, "This looks like MapMyRun." That site does pretty much the same thing as EveryTrail, although it's designed with a laser focus on recording runs and jogs. So if you find yourself in a new city and want to go for a jog, check it out. MapMyRun doesn't have the photo feature of EveryTrail, but it does offer more runner-friendly features, such as a workout calculator. The MapMyRun team has also launched a new site, MapMyRace, a simplified site where runners can scope out race routes (including elevation maps).

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The U.S. elections are only a few days away, and it's becoming clear that in many corners of the country, electronic voting could prove to be a disaster. Veronica's out sick, but we found the moon tapes! I'd rather have V. and the moon tapes.

EPISODE 347

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Google's Java-based Gmail app will come with new Sprint phones
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The new Google Reader gets its own mobile version, too
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Google is very smart about mobile devices. On a PDA or a cell phone, the Google search experience has been, for quite a while, very different than it is on a full-size screen. Google even parses Web pages it links to and tries to repackage them in a mobile-friendly way. (To force the Google mobile version, go to www.google.com/m.)

Gmail, though, has not been a great experience on mobile devices. But today Google is releasing a mobile Java Gmail application for cell phones that makes using your Gmail account much easier [news story]. The new app, which will be preloaded onto some new Sprint phones or available for download for anyone else who has a Java-capable phone here, is a very good mobile version of the Gmail Web app. The app gives Gmail its own custom menu system, which is much easier to navigate than a Web-based app would be on a cell phone. Gmail's message threading also shows up clearly, and the site displays attachments (such as photos, Word documents) in the app. One snag: In my tests on the phone Google sent me to try the product, links to documents on Google Docs and Spreadsheets did not work. Oops. (A new WAP version of the reader is available, too, which I have not tried.)

In related news, Google's new RSS reader also now has a mobile interface. It's a subtly different application from the full-size Web version of Google Reader. In the mobile app, you're presented first with your "reading list," the nine most recent stories to come into your feeds. You can select one by pressing its number (1 to 9; or 0 for the next nine), and, as with Google.com on a mobile, you'll get a special lightweight display of the story instead of the fully loaded page. You can also select a feed to read or search through your tags, but the cell phone interface is better suited to the task of skimming feeds.

Google clearly recognizes that when you're using its services on a mobile device, you probably want not just a different user interface, but different content as well. These are good mobile apps.

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