Local & Travel

Location Based Social Networking with Whrrl [Guest Post]

by Carrie on August 26, 2010

SavingForSomeday.comYesterday I told you about my experience with Foursquare, but Foursquare is far from the only location based social networking service out there. Today we’ll hear about Whrrl from my friend Sara of Saving for Someday.

WhrrlHave you ever gone to a concert or out to dinner only to find out days later that one of your friends was at the same place but you didn’t know? Does your family live in another city or state and want you to send pictures or tell them what you’re doing? Do you want to document your life’s adventures?

Now imagine you had Whrrl. The location based social networking app for your phone could make it possible to find people you know simply by checking in on your phone. With a few taps, you can not only let people know where you are but also tell others what you think of the location or experience and share photos. You can also share up to the minute photos of the kids, a great meal, or a fab outfit. And you can also leave your thoughts and impressions for others to see.

I first used Whrrl at a blogging conference. It was helpful to find friends in a crowd and share my experience with my friends & family back home. But when I returned home, I just didn’t know what I would do with it. My friends were not on Whrrl and I wondered why complete strangers would really care that I like the lemon gelato somewhere. But as I met more people and talked about it, I realized that it’s not just about letting my friends know I’ve arrived somewhere. But, it’s a way to connect with online friends, IRL friends, family, brands and like-minded people.

Here are my 5 reasons for using Whrrl

whrrl recommend1. Whrrl interfaces with Twitter and Facebook. You can share your location, recommendations and pictures with your friends, family and followers on Twitter and Facebook. Friends and family can keep up with you. In addition, other people can find out what you think about where you’ve been.

2. It’s a great tool when traveling. Recently I was in the San Francisco area and was not very familiar with places to eat or attractions that might be a good fit for my 7-year old daughter. Whrrl was an invaluable tool because locals had recommended places, provided photos and gave their honest opinions. I could look up information based on where I was at any given time. I could then enter my thoughts and recommendations and pictures and build upon existing stories, so the next person could have more information. Also, it ties back to #1, Twitter. And this is how Carrie and I connected. I was looking for a restaurant and I Whrrl’d my location and posted it to Twitter with a comment about finding a good place to eat. Minutes later, I had a tweet from @carrieactually telling me of a great place. So rather than a hit and miss experience, I could take her recommendation, look it up on Whrrl and see that other people agreed. Decision made!

whrrl share3. You can chronicle your life. With Whrrl, you can upload photos and add captions and create a story about where you are and what you are experiencing. This is a great way to share your experience with your friends, your family and your community. It can be as routine as going to the store to shop for Back to School or as unique as a limo ride through wine country. You’re providing valuable information about stores, people, sights, sounds and experiences. You’re encouraging people to get out and chronicle their life too!

4. Whrrl can be used on a smartphone or in a web-based application. Sometimes you want to check in and just take pictures and enjoy your experience and then document and share it later. Whrrl can do that. Besides using your phone to chronicle your experience you can upload photos to your computer and further create a story online with Whrrl. You can add notes, comments, and recommendations in addition to all the photos.

5. It’s fun! I see the great things my friends are doing and be inspired to get out. I can make new friends, try new things and get out and live rather than wonder if something will work for me or my family. I also like to share my experiences and hear what other people say or see that one of my friends wants to do something based on my recommendation.

If you would like to see what Whrrl is all about, you can download it from the app store on your smartphone. You can go directly to Whrrl and sign up. Start living out loud!

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Location Based Social Networking with Foursquare #BlogHer10

by Carrie on August 25, 2010

More and more people these days have cell phones with a GPS feature and a data plan and location based social networking uses those features to allow you to indicate to your friends where you currently are. The idea behind location based social networking is that your current location is your status update. Rather than telling people where you are, you can show them on a map.

foursquare iconI’m using Foursquare to experiment with location based social networking. I picked it over a handful of other options because it seemed like the most popular network and some places I frequent like Starbucks and Chili’s have discounts and freebies for Foursquare users.

I’ve been using Foursquare for about two and a half months now. It took me a long time to finally join because I was concerned about the privacy and security issues of broadcasting my current location to the whole world. But the fact is you’re not broadcasting it to the whole world.

The Foursquare iPhone app allows you to select various levels of location sharing each time you check in:

  • You can choose to check in “off the grid” which means you can see the action in your own history and stats but no one else can see it.
  • You can share with just your Foursquare friends. I’m currently keeping this list pretty much restricted to people I know in real life who I trust to know my current location at any time.
  • You can send your check in to Facebook. My Facebook profile is also limited to only people I know in real life but I don’t want to flood them with check ins at the grocery store so I rarely use this option but I did use it on my recent trip to New York when visiting interesting landmarks.
  • You can send your check in to Twitter. This is the most public of the options if your Twitter profile is publicly visible. I very rarely use this option, but I did use it a lot when I was at #BlogHer10 along with a lot of my Twitter friends.

What I love about Foursquare is the history and statistics. I’m obsessed with personal data collection and love to be able to see the record of my life in numbers.

This is a screen shot of my history page while I was at #BlogHer10. Thursday involved a lot of off site private events at various locations: the Kodak event at Caroline’s, Social Luxe at Arena, and Martha Stewart’s event at her New York office and then I came back to the hotel for one of the conference parties. Friday and Saturday I spent my time in the hotel attending the conference, Friday I wound down the evening chatting with friends in the hotel lobby bar and Saturday started with an early off site breakfast. (Sometimes I forget to check in at places while I’m there which is why Thursday shows me checking in at Martha Stewart and the Hilton at the same time but as far as the privacy and security concerns go that might actually work in my favor.)

foursquare history

This is a screen shot of my statistics for the past month. Again I just love to quantify my life in numbers. Since I was on vacation in New York City for the first time ever, I probably checked in at a lot more places and a lot more new places than normal. As you can see, the graph points towards the end of this 30 day segment are much higher than at the beginning when I was just hanging out around home.

foursquare stats

Have you tried a location based social network? What do you like or dislike about it?

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Sparklecorn meet The Met #BlogHer10

by Carrie on August 23, 2010

Sparklecorn

Saturday night, #BlogHer10 came to a close with the Sparklecorn party which glorified and embraced the tackiness of glitter and unicorns. Take a minute to watch the video of the awesome unicorn cake from Charm City Cakes and then you’ll only have the smallest taste of what Sparklecorn was.

There was also an abundance of glow jewelry, unicorn shaped glitter, candy, 80s music, and a plentiful supply of free drink tickets that needed to be used up at that last party on #pinktwitters.

The #pinktwitter was the signature cocktail of the event and is made up of orange flavored Ketel One vodka, lemonade, grenadine, and mint.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Earlier in the week, my mom and I visited the Met where I assessed that tacky is nothing new. I observed antique glitter, unicorns, excessive use of hair styling products, and gold pet jewelry.

Our first stop within the Met was American Decorative Arts where I was particularly interested in seeing the Tiffany stained glass. The Tiffany pieces were amazing and there were displayed along with some of the work of his next closest competitor and when you look at the pieces side by side it’s obvious that Tiffany was a much, much more talented artist and his name really does deserve the regard it holds today. My favorite of the Tiffany pieces was the Autumn Landscape stained glass window.

On our way through the American Decorative Arts area, I observed a sconce covered in mica (which is the ingredient used in cosmetics, paints, plastics, and inks to make them sparkle). The sconce, made in the early 18th century, would hold and candle and the candlelight would make the whole thing glitter like crazy.

young hercules scupltureNext we visited the Greek and Roman Art collection. While sitting to rest our feet in a massive hall of marble statues, we observed a young Hercules with a lion pelt over his arm. The lion’s hair was styled the same as all of the other Greek hair and we decided that the Greek’s must’ve used a seriously strong hair sculpting product.

Upstairs in the study collections, we looked at the Etruscan art. Etruscans being possibly the indigenous people of Italy who lived in the area that is now Tuscany before they were assimilated by the Romans. The Etruscans must have really loved their pets because a display case of their gold jewelry included jewelry for pets that had been made in 500-300BC. And I thought humans had only imagined the tackiness of dressing up and decorating our pets in the last 10 or so years.

unicornWhile on our way out of the Museum, we walked through the Midevil Art gallery where I caught a glimpse of a unicorn out of the corner of my eye. Upon further exploration of the Met’s collection database from home, I’ve discovered that they have many unicorn related art pieces and next time I’m in New York, I’ll certainly visit The Cloisters which houses a story about a unicorn in the form of 8 tapestries.

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American Museum of Natural History’s Explorer iPhone App

by Carrie on August 19, 2010

While in New York earlier this month, my mom and I visited the American Museum of Natural History.

We checked out the bird and mammal dioramas, the Hall of Minerals and Hall of Gems where we admired the Star of India which is the world’s largest star sapphire, and the fossil halls where the highlight of my visit was a view of a T-Rex as first discovered on an expedition sponsored by the museum in 1902.

As impressive as the museum exhibits were, we were even more impressed by the museum’s free iPhone app.

Natural History Museum AppThe American Museum of Natural History Explorer app provided an incredibly easy to use directory of all the popular items on display, halls, food, shops, restaurants, and exits and it provides turn by turn directions within the museum from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. The app made it so easy for us to get from the Hall of Gems to T-Rex even though they’re at nearly opposite corners of the building.

The app also comes with several built in tours to guide you through popular exhibits. There’s a Dino tour, an Earth and Space tour, and 3 different lengths of Highlights or Night at the Museum tours. We already had a good idea of what exhibits we wanted to hit so we didn’t do any of the tours but had we not known exactly what we wanted to see, I think one of the Highlights tours would have been perfect for us.

The other fabulous thing about the museum is that they provided amazingly simple to access and reliable free wi-fi to support the use of their Explorer app.

The bar has been set high and within the next few years every world class museum is going to need an app this good.

Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links.

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August’s Must Have $5 Albums from Amazon #BlogHer10

by Carrie on August 11, 2010

For the month of August, Amazon has super sized their normal $5 albums selection from 100 to 1000 (or so they say, once you go browsing the selection is actually over 1200).

Ace of BaseIf you don’t already have a solid selection of Ace of Base songs in your music library, you must pick up Ace of Base’s Greatest Hits. At #BlogHer10, @happysquid and I were going to do a karaoke performance of The Sign together but unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, too many other people also wanted to do karaoke and we didn’t get our turn. I seriously considered posting a recording of myself singing the song but remember when I told you about how I hate the sound of my own voice: well my recorded singing voice is painfully worse than my talking voice so you can just count yourselves lucky that there was no karaoke performance in the first place. I sound so good in my head though.

Other albums in this month’s selection that I think are must haves include:

Can you tell that I’m kind of still stuck in the 90s? I have a theory that whatever bands are popular while you’re in high school are the ones you will always consider classic.

But here are a few post high school bands that I love:

There’s also a great selection of Disney music which my friend specifically requested I include on the playlist I created for our last roadtrip.

Good thing I already bought most of this music one album at a time, pre greatest hits collections, and at full price over the course of the last decade or so. If I hadn’t, I’d be shelling out a lot of money on $5 albums this month.

Disclosure: Some links in this post are affiliate links.

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