Where ya’ll at!?

Aaron Talbot — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:09:00 +0000

Of all the ways social media has infiltrated our lives none have impacted our daily lives as much as location based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places have. People are “checking-in” at places like startbucks, colleges, hotels, bars and the corner coffee shop to share with the world exactly what they are doing at lightning speed. How is this relevant? Why should we care? To be honest, I don’t know but I’m as guilty as any other Foursquare “Mayor” out there.

I know at first I got into it with a co-worker, battling over who would become mayor of our office but after that it became part of my daily routine. Checking in at the movies, out to dinner with my girlfriend or even visiting my parents. Did anyone really care where I was, what I was eating or who I was with? Not sure but it was fun at the time. Nowadays I’m a little more selective about where and when I check-in. Trying to limit my check-ins to notable locations or when I leave the city. People aren’t the only ones utilizing these check-in services though, many local (and national) restaurants, coffee shops and bars are taking part in the action.

Whether they like it or not people are checking into there establishments on a daily basis, writing reviews, snapping photos or even bad mouthing the waitress through their mobile devices. By offering specials to their loyal customers they are creating a whole new type of customer. They are encouraging their current customers to come back more often to keep their “special” discounts and unique mayorship. Discounts can be creative—not just for mayors or check-ins but can reward a person for a second their second, third or fifth visit. Companies big and small can create incentives using Foursquare’s campy, addictive features, even adding to the medley of badges awarded for completing different tasks, like Starbucks’ Barista badge for checking into five different Starbucks.

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Ride the wave, dude.

idfive — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:24:00 +0000

Google Wave is hitting the proverbial shelf tomorrow and I have never seen people this excited about a intangible product. The hype is warranted and I tend to think that Google Wave may move the web into its next tier.

Current development standards require a developer to learn and keep track of a never-ending list of APIs. These APIs essentially allow creators to build projects that piggy-back on web services that have already been established. It seems that every site and web app has one and in order to build using an API, a developer has to spend the time learning how to create an application that incorporates the API’s specific quirks.

One of the reasons that makes Google Wave so interesting is that Google is creating its own protocol for it called the Google Wave Federation Protocol. This is an open source project in order to get full participation from developers and programmers. What this means to developers is that potentially everyone could get on the same page about how to communicate between web services. Theoretically, it means that all IM clients could pick this up and regardless of if you used AIM, gChat or Facebook Chat, you would be able to communicate with each other (much like how email works).

Pounding IE (internet explorer) into submission is always a plus too.

In order for Google to have Wave work correctly in IE6, it has created a workaround in the form of a plugin called Frame. IE6 is, has always been, and hopefully will cease to be the BIGGEST pain in the ass for web developers. Once the plugin has been installed, Google Frame will render content as it would in the Chrome browser…. and allows for HTML5. That means developers can focus on better interaction instead of conforming to IE6.

IE6′s reign of terror is closing faster now because of Google’s friendly monopolization.

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attentionscan » API

Where ya’ll at!?

Ride the wave, dude.