So, since most people simply just want to know where you are without hurting their heads doing a reverse geocode, I have created a greasemonkey user script to help them out.

It takes a twitterrific created location that says “iPhone: 40.733956,-73.992789″ and turns it into “New York, New York, US”

If you have greasemonkey installed, all you need to do is download and install this user script and you will be set. If you don’t have greasemonkey, then you will need to obviously install it first and revisit this page to download the user script.

Hopefully one day the twitterrific iphone app will do this automatically so this script is not needed, but until then, I hope this helps some people out.

I live about an hour from the nearest apple store, and HATE standing in lines. So on Monday, I started to wonder what is the best way to predict iPhone 3G shipments without stalking the store, and could I perhaps predict accurately enough so that I could get one without standing in line.

Using Apples retail availability page, which is only available after 9pm, was out of the question. But I was curious how they were getting data to that page, and was there a way I could get the data, collect it and analyze it.

And it turns out there was.

Apple is using a json data feed to populate their own availability page. And the json data feed is updating live 24 hours a day. So Monday afternoon I started collecting it about every hour and on Tuesday I started some basic visualizations.

My first cut can be seen at http://andrew.io/3g-retail-stock.

I don’t have a iPhone 3G yet, but I plan to continue collecting the data, and adding visualizations to see if any detectable patterns emerge over time. But at a minimum this can be viewed as an hourly availability tracker with some history of availability.

I hope people like it.

But if you use it, I would recommend you go ahead and call the store before you show up, cause if they don’t have them I take no responsibility.