Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Foursquare and Facebook Places: educate me, entertain me, supersize me.

Published on November 10, 2010 in Australia, Facebook, Foursquare, Uncategorized, business, mobile, social media and technology. View Comments

I thought I’d share a couple of nearby Foursquare offers as a snapshot of what’s going on in the geolocation space, just in my local area. Regular readers will know I’ve written a few other posts about Australian businesses experimenting in the geolocation space.

I see we have the University of Technology, Sydney offering a free movie ticket for the Foursquare Mayor of the UTS Library on a certain day. Interesting new way to encourage students to study? If you come an study at the library regularly, we’ll reward you with some entertainment.

UTS Library Foursquare offer

Of course we also have fast food chains starting to offer the “supersize me” types of deals we’re all familiar with.

Never to be outdone, I see that Facebook is now introducing Facebook Deals, which is layered on top of Facebook Places, to provide a similar service to local businesses and users of Facebook.

What kind of offers have you seen in your local area? Anything that’s tempted you yet?

New and improved Google Realtime Search.

Published on August 26, 2010 in Google, Uncategorized, social media, technology and video. View Comments

Google has actually had real-time search for a while now, and has been improving it periodically. You may have read my previous post from May comparing 10 different real-time search engines, which included Google’s offering.

To recap, as they say in the embedded “How to” video, Google Realtime allows you to search real-time content from across the web. Sources include news stories, blog posts and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and Friendfeed. The real-time stream constantly and automatically refreshes, feeding in live content as it’s posted to the web.

Google Realtime features now include:

  • The ability to look back in time to view updates from the past.
  • The ability to refine your search by location – by town, state or country.
  • The ability to browse a conversation (on Twitter for instance), to see how it developed over time.
  • The ability to set up Google Alerts for real-time updates.

Personally, I really like the addition of being able to refine search by location. As in my previous real-time search engine comparison post, I searched under a favourite topic of mine, cleantech, and then refined the search just to Australia.  It came up with some interesting and useful results for me. I’ve previously said, as it’s not a new feature, that I also like the ability to be able to search historically. This remains true.

What are your thoughts on Google Realtime Search? Have you found yourself using it yet? Is it useful enough for you, or do you use another real-time search engine? Do you use real-time search at all?

Check the embedded video for the full set of new features in more detail and how to use them.

Thanks @warlach via @andrewsayer for the heads up this morning.