Tag: LOCATION

In this corner, with a big head start, a huge userbase, and tons of features, it's ... Foursquare! In this corner, with millions of dollars in funding and a great-looking new design ... Gowalla! digg_url = 'http://digg.com/apple/DING_Round_2_Foursquare_Gowalla_both_update_iPhone_Apps'; By now, most people know that Gowalla and Foursquare have been going blow-for-blow in the location-based ...

Chatroulette, the anonymous video chat service that has captured the Internet's imagination (and free time), is known for wanton nudity and crazy stunts. That's because of the "anonymous" part of Chatroulette. You can be anyone you want, and you can wear anything you want (or not)! However, Chatroulette isn't as anonymous as we previously supposed. A new site called Chatroulette Map has ...

Twitter and Facebook both moved forward with their new location-based features today, with Twitter switching on geolocation features on Twitter.com, and Facebook announcing it will allow users to share their locations. We already knew that Twitter's move was coming, because Twitter's location services have been part of the API and available in third-party apps for some time now. TechCrunch is ...

Google continues to get better at narrowing search results based on your location. First, they implemented the "near me now" search option for Google Mobile and Android, and now they're bringing location-based results to the desktop. If you pop open the search options panel on Google.com, you can choose "nearby," and Google will return only results from your general geographic area. At worst, ...

A big part of getting a location-based app right is -- shocker! -- providing an accurate location. Gowalla is using that principle to get a leg up in its battle with Foursquare for location-based check-in supremacy. Gowalla now uses Skyhook in its Android app, which means it's providing some of the best location data around. The Android app is currently in beta, although it's not highly ...

Twitter has just started rolling out location-based trending topics, but for now only to about 1% of their users. The new feature will be called Local Trends, and will use your location information to present trending topics that are happening near you. Twitter is remaining fairly tight-lipped on the new functionality for now, preferring to wait until it rolls out to a wider audience before ...

Finding information about businesses in your vicinity just got one step easier. Thanks to a new Google feature called "near me now," you don't even have to enter a location to search around your location on your mobile device. "Near me now" uses your phone's GPS – on Android or via Google's mobile website - to let you browse nearby locations. Near me now offers a list of common ...

Yahoo's FireEagle project has long been a great (albeit under-used) service to let you share your location with other websites. Services such as Dopplr, Brightkite and many others can all update & read your location and use the service to display location-based data. On the iPhone, there's plenty of free applications that update FireEagle such as yofe, but what if you're working on a ...

As a user of the location-based social game Foursquare, I'm not sure how I missed this one: thanks to a new round of funding, Foursquare is expanding to new cities and making some dramatic improvements to its website. One of the more obvious changes is the new domain name: foursquare.com. Previously, the service was running on playfoursquare.com. The site is now easier to navigate and much more ...

Twitter Trends, whether you find them useful or not, are a rich and interesting set of data to work with. The problem is that you can't narrow it down much: trend data comes Twitter users around the world, with no way to filter by region. Trendsmap combines Twitter Trends with Google Maps to add that ability. You can zoom in and out on the map to narrow your view of trends to the area you're ...

According to a patent filing back in February, Apple may be working on a new location-specific home screen for the iPhone. In the patent, Apple outlines how a user could set a persistent default location in the weather app, and set location-based arrangements of app icons on the home screen. The patent drawings show icons for local contacts, local weather, local time and local maps. Instead of ...

Location-based Twitter projects are tough to pull off, because whatever's in the location field of a user's profile could be completely made up, if the user enters anything at all. There's no reliable way to know where a tweet is coming from. Twitter wants to change that, though, and they've got a geolocation team working on an API that will let app developers map your tweets. Before anyone gets ...

Sharing your location via a mobile device is a great way to let friends and family know where you are, and encourage people you know to meet up with you. The challenge is in making it as easy as possible for the right people to see your location while hiding it from random Internet strangers. Glympse is a clever new approach to the problem, allowing location-sharing on a time limited ...

One of the first things people do when buying a first computer and connecting to the internet for the first time is look up people they know (or would like to know, or are upset that they don't know anymore). Now Google-stalking is about to go to a whole new level though, because Google has launched a new service called Latitude that lets you see the locations of people you know on a map. ...

I have to confess that, until today, I was still converting latitude and longitude by Googling "convert GPS coordinates" and putting it into whatever came up first. That just changed when I found Tiny Geo-coder. It converts coordinate pairs to addresses, and vice versa. Not only that, but it has an API, so you can use it in other web projects that require coordinates. One of the first real-world ...