Google Does Geolocation

I like geolocation. At first, it seemed pretty creepy, but now, there’s a lot of potential for geo-based features that are both and good for you. I write about geo-services quite a bit, and I’m a fan of services like Fire Eagle and Shizzow and BrightKite and all the others. They all have one problem… Read More

OpenWorld Call for Papers

Did you catch the announcement yesterday that the OpenWorld 2009 Call for Papers is on like Donkey Kong? The call lasts until April 19, and it sounds like the Suggest a Session program on Mix will be renewed in June. The OpenWorld blog offers some tips on proposal submission: Give your paper a clear and… Read More

Feeling Lucky?

I always find it noteworthy when a handful of stories about a single company or service pop up within a day or so. Usually, none of them alone is all that interesting, but as a collection, they sometimes form a story that I find blogworthy. This time it’s Google’s Web Search. Totally weird to see… Read More

Had Enough Twitter Yet?

Twitter is exploding. You’ve probably seen the numbers. 1,382% comparing February 2009 with February 2008. More than 50% from January 2009 to February 2009. By all measures, that’s an insane growth rate. Mainstream media has taken note, and celebrities (and impostors) are flocking to Twitter in droves. Pun intended. Do you have a favorite celebrity… Read More

I Want VLI

Back in 2006 while on a trip to HQ, I sat in a meeting with some folks from the User Experience (UX) team. I don’t remember exactly what the purpose of the meeting was, but we wandered off topic and were just bouncing ideas off each other. I threw out the idea of a zero… Read More

Trying Pivotal Tracker

Last week, Rich proposed that we try Pivotal Tracker for Connect. Our work on Connect can be loosely described as agile. We generally meet, either in person or on the phone, to hash out major feature releases, and then Rich and Anthony build and deploy. And I test. Every six months or so, we rinse… Read More

Freely Available Utilities

The title comes from a phrase that stood out for me in this post from RWW. That post highlights some really sweet data pr0n (TwitterThoughts and World Twitter Map) built by Yvo Schaap that uses the Twitter API for data, Yahoo Pipes for parsing and the Google Visualization API for producing the eye candy. All… Read More

What is Blogging to You?

This post on Mashable today about another WordPress plugin that can integrate and surface your FriendFeed and Twitter activity on your blog got me thinking about what a blog means anymore. Blogging used to be the ultimate form of self-expression (or navel-gazing, depending on your perspective) on the ‘tubes, but now, Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook… Read More

More on Social Search

So, yesterday I started making the case for social search as an excellent way to find information locked away within an enterprise, and the ability to get good information from social search pays for investments in social networks. I didn’t cover much detail though. So, that’s the focus of today’s post. Social search in my… Read More

Social Search Wins

When you start talking to an enterprise crowd about social networking, inevitably someone asks for real business benefits, a.k.a. ROI. I know, hard to believe. When we first started the ‘Lab, Paul used to ask how many people have a Facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn account. Usually less than half the room would raise hands, and that number went… Read More

Now We’re on FriendFeed

Disqus announced an integration with FriendFeed today. We’ve used Disqus for a while here and were early FriendFeed adopters. I like both services but have struggled to keep up with comments on FriendFeed that apply to posts made here. The FriendFeed plugin was great, but that stopped working a few months ago. So, the news… Read More

Posting to Twitter, Take 2

Last week, I started posting tweets to theappslab Twitter account. That didn’t last very long. The plugin I used stopped working shortly thereafter; initially, I thought it might be a conflict with TweetSuite, which I’ve found to be disappointing so far (and have turned off, for now anyway). But even with TweetSuite out of the… Read More