A Sheep Asleep

Technology and walking - it’s amazing how far we’ve come. When I first started visiting the Scottish highlands 20 years ago, the only electronic device I had with me was a digital watch. On my latest trip I had a GPS, iPhone and digital camera plus associated re-charging paraphernalia.

I have mixed feelings about the appropriateness of lugging all this gear into the wilderness, particularly given how much of it is highly allergic to water and needs swaddling in protective plastic adding yet more weight. It’s bizarre how we’re unable to tolerate a tent that weighs 500g more than a competitor but generally happy to carry several kilos of electronic equipment.

Nevertheless, With my day job being digital marketing, my interest was immediately piqued when I came across a new website - Social Hiking. The site brings together GPS tracking, previously the domain of relatively expensive specialist equipment, with social media, allowing you to create in effect a live “walk stream” which others can follow whilst you’re out on the trail. For runners, sites like Mapmyrun perform a similar sort of service. The huge growth of GPS enabled smartphones has made this possible. Unless you’re an unabashed luddite, it’s now likely that the phone in your pocket functions as well as a high spec standalone GPS unit.

So how does it all work? You register with the website and link up your social media accounts and an app on your GPS enabled phone (Viewranger or Instamapper). You then switch on your phone, turn on the app and head out of the door.

The app gathers GPS data at set intervals and relays this location data via the mobile phone network to the website which plots it in close to real time on a personalised map as a series of “beacons” along your route. If you’re in a remote area with no cellular coverage, the app saves your beacons and transmits them when you next hit a mobile signal.In the field, the system works well, but as you’d expect with an “Alpha” test release, there are a few teething problems, but mostly on the smartphone side rather than with the website.

If you run GPS on your smartphone you’ll know that it quickly drains the battery, not great if you’re on a multiday trip with limited opportunity to re-charge. On my last trip I was reduced to skulking in corners of campsite toilets jacking up on power from “illicit” plug sockets. Currently (sorry, bad pun) AA battery chargers seem to be the best mobile re-charging option as I’ve yet to come across a portable solar charger that works very well.

In terms of the apps, with both Viewranger and Instamapper quitting the app causes unsent beacons to be lost. This is a particular problem with Instamapper on the iPhone which doesn’t run in the background ie you have to quit the app if you want to do anything else with your phone. It would be good to see these apps offering an option to “save beacons” and then manually send them at a time of your choosing.

To get round the cellular connectivity problem, the Social Hiking system is also being tested with SPOT, a commercial location beacon service that uses a satellite rather than a cellular network for the “uplink”, guaranteeing connectivity even in remote areas. On my first winter Cape Wrath Trail trip I took an early model SPOT tracker that used the ageing Irridium satellite network.

I found it very tricky to successfully send beacons and recall huddling in driving rain on the side of a glen waving the orange device at the stormy skies screaming “fucking send, you fucking fucker!”, not my finest hour. I gather that newer models use a more reliable satellite uplink, but they retail at more than £100 plus a data subscription - so it’s not going to be a mainstream option.

The Social Hiking website itself works remarkably well for an Alpha release. Logging in is done with your Twitter credentials which seems reasonable given the social nature of the site. The site links to other social media sites and you can include information on your map from Twitter, Twitpic (pictures), Audioboo (audio), Flickr (pictures), Qik (live video), and ipadio (audio via a phone call).

You can view and share your maps on a Google Map (offering terrain, roads, satellite, satellite and Google Earth options) or Ordnance Survey. Another great feature is the ability to embed the maps in your own blog or website by means of an iFrame.
If you’re doing a route across several days, you can create a multi-day route that takes all the beacons between your start and end date and combines them to create a single map for the whole route.

The Social Hiking website is at present a small “labour of love” project, but the time will soon come when it needs, to use that awful non-word, “monetisation”. Bandwidth bills don’t pay themselves after all. There a few obvious ways to do this. I think users would be prepared to pay to store larger numbers of routes (say more than 5) or connect multiple social media accounts (say more than 3). This “freemium” model, where users get the basic functionality for nothing and pay for the extras has become fairly standard.

Work could also be done to enhance the social and user profile elements of the site. Perhaps in the future, profiles  could integrate more closely with Facebook pulling in details and making publishing to Facebook easier. There is also huge potential in the routes themselves. Over time, the site will be compiling a large directory of routes, which will be a great asset.

Making publicly shared routes easily visible, browsable, searchable and shareable (eg by area, length, type of journey etc) will be important. Grough does something similar with their routes at the moment. What’s also needed is for website development to be matched by app development, perhaps even with a bespoke Social Hiking app if third party apps don’t come forward with the necessary features.

Other improvements to the overall experience will come as a result of improved smartphone battery performance and advances in on-the-go re-charging. Connectivity will also continue to improve exponentially. You can already get a 3G signal on Everest (as Kenton Cool recently demonstrated) so before long (ie in the next 5-10 years) most UK outdoor areas will have mobile data connectivity.

Social Hiking is an excellent and promising website. It’s relatively simple to use and passes the “I wish I’d thought of that” test. But whilst I love gadgetry, my reservations about taking all this technology into the outdoors still remain -  I feel conflicted by the ever increasing complexity. For me, the outdoors is the antidote to my overly connected life not an extension of it.

So maybe, just to maintain a healthy balance, I’ll strike off on my next trip with nothing but a bivvy bag and a good book. You could call that Antisocial Hiking.

You can check out my Social Hiking map for my recent trip up the West Highland Way and then on to Strathcarron…at least until the point my phone battery finally gave up.