With FaceBook, with Twitter, feedback mechanisms and all the online social mediums for conversations we’ve attempted to integrate WildObs into those social mediums not create yet another one. As such we resisted creating a forum system for WildObs, until now…

Some conversations are just not that social … they are quite specific, and not something to overload your friends and followers activity streams with. So, we’ve launched WildObs Forums with initially some pretty focused goals:

http://forums.wildobs.com/

Note: You use your WildObs username and password to access these forums.

Help & Using WildObs:

http://forums.wildobs.com/list.php?3

Wildobs Features: What would you like WildObs to do?

http://forums.wildobs.com/list.php?4

and because it is new/maturing/different, WildObs Mobile the mobile website:

http://forums.wildobs.com/list.php?9

Discussions on Wildobsing: Getting out and about and generally interacting with nature:

http://forums.wildobs.com/list.php?8

Please let us know if you have more ideas on forums you’d like to see here.

WildObsMobile for iPhone allows wildlife enthusiasts to enjoy the WildObs community; access featured, popular and recent encounters as well as look-up species.

Unlike WildObs Observer, which is  designed as an offline tool for field work, WildObs Mobile is an online tool for interacting with the WildObs Community. WildObsMobile utilizes minimal device storage.

Check out this free wildlife iphone application — and allow WildObs to help you find your nature:

WildObs Mobile 1.0 for iPhone

Want access to your wildlife encounters when you are out an about? Want to know what you saw the last time you visited this park, beach, or location? Want to know what others have been seeing that isn’t on your life-list? If so, then WildObs Naturalist (the latest member of the WildObs family of wildlife applications) is for you.

WildObs Naturalist ... find your nature

View your recent, local and popular encounters (or encounters by tag):

WildObs Naturalist: Your encounters

Review your wildlife life-list:

Check your species life-list

See what others have seen close to where you are that is not on your life-list, then find out where to find those species locally:

WildObs Naturalist - Local species not on your Lifelist

WildObs Lookout is the latest iphone application to join the WildObs family of wildlife iphone applications. Lookout allows you to find nature around you (to “keep a lookout”) and get some ideas of what wildlife you could experience. Let crowd-sourcing help you get away from the crowds and experiencing nature…

Are you visiting a park for the first time, are you looking for something new around you? Do you have an itch to experience something new? Let the many amazing wildlife observers in the wildobs community lead you to nature. See what others are seeing, and tune in to the wildlife around you:

• Lookout is location based, it shows you encounters around where you are.
• Dive into each encounter:
  • Map the encounters, include your current location, launch Google maps for driving directions.
  • Expand photographs for greater detail.
  • Explore the species (locally, on wildobs and on the Internet w/ NWF.org and Wikipedia.)
  • Find more local encounters for the species.
• Browse community encounters:
  • Recent encounters from the wildobs time-line.
  • Features encounters (great stories, images or otherwise special critters/encounters.)
  • Popular encounters (voted on by the WildObs community.)

• View encounters for species from your “favorite species” list.
• View encounters for species from your “wish-list species” list.
• Comment on observer encounters within the community.

WildObs Lookout 1.0

Find your nature…

Lookout for nature...

Dig into each encounter:

View the encounter

Map any set of encounters (local or wide spread):

Map wildlife encounters

Get you wildlife from WildObs on your Android phone. WildObs Mobile (the first WildObs application for Android operating system) allows you to:

• View community wildlife encounters:
  • Recent encounters (the community time-line.)
  • Features encounters (great stories, images or otherwise special critters/encounters.)
  • Popular encounters (voted by the community.)
• Do a species look-up by name, partial name and/or alias.
• Check out places for wildlife; parks/neighborhoods.

This free application is available on the Android Market:

Browse encounters, and select from the menu.

WildObs Mobile for Android

Perform a species look-up.

WildObs Mobile Species Search for Android

When WildObs Observer for the iPhone and iPod Touch was conceived, the plan was to develop an offline capable application. Much of wildlife is to be seen where there is no wireless or cellphone connectivity and I wanted to support people getting away from it all, and getting into nature. Also, back then there were tens of species in the WildObs database, but not hundreds/thousands.

Since then the database has grown, the species list is far wider and more exotic, and downloading all the images was taking way too much device resources (especially for the casual observer.) So, here we have WildObs Observer 1.4 with some new settings:

1. “Show Species Icons” shows you the thumbnail pictures when in the species pages. Turn this off to hide these images and significantly increase scrolling performance.
2. “Download Images” enables downloading for all images for offline use. It defaults to be off, and when off only those images of species you’ve reported, or use regularly, or are known to be around you are downloaded. All other images are downloaded on demand over WiFi or 3G or phone network.

Version 1.4: Lightening the image load...

WildObs Observer (the iPhone Application for recording your wildlife encounters) is now available for download from the Apple App Store:

Here is the link to the application. It launches iTunes to view/install the application:

  http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309451803&mt=8

Here is a recent screen shot of the application (there are more above):

Notice the NWF logo, that is a shout out to their wonderful Wildlife Watch program. WildObs encounters tweeted for the user by WildObs use the #nwf tag to stream into the NWF WildlifeWatch Twitter Timeline.

Ok, so things are still experimental (with a TZ glitch or two) but live for tinkering. Here is what we have.

To Send a WildObs to WildObs via Twitter:

Once you’ve Twitter enabled your account (and done the follow wildobs step) you can:

/d wildobs {Entity name or Category name} [at Where [at When]]

For example:

/d wildobs Fox at Coal Creek Canyon

or

/d wildobs Moose at Rocky Mountain National Park at 10:00am

or

/d wildobs Cougar @home 10:00am

… the location alias obviates the need for the ” at ” separators.
Twitter Enabling your WildObs account
Go to your “Services” tab on your “Mange Profile” section and enter your twitter username (so you can direct message wildobs) and if you’d like twitter status changes for each posting your twitter password. If you subsequently follow “wildobs” on Twitter it can direct mesage you back.

Again:

• Just enter the username and you’ll be able to direct message WildObs.
• Enter username and password and it’ll publish your encounters as tweets.

Why would you want to do this?

Why not tweet your encounter as you see it, and then upload a photo or add a fuller description later? Why not share your encounters with your Twitter followers?

Feedback Please
Please let us know how this works for you.

This is the official blog of the wildobs.com website.