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Link Love: Carmen Sandiego, Impulsive Buyers, and more

January 28, 2011 · 0 comments

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Link Love: Freak Out and Eat Cake, Netflix for iPhone, and more

August 27, 2010 · 3 comments

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Location Based Social Networking with Whrrl [Guest Post]

August 26, 2010 · 2 comments

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

August 25, 2010 · 7 comments

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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How to Use Tweetdeck to Keep from Being Overwhelmed by Twitter

August 9, 2010 · 13 comments

So you’ve signed up for Twitter, you’re tweeting some, you’re following some people but you’re getting totally overwhelmed. How do you keep up with the people and topics that are most important to you without having to stress about the rest?

It’s time to get organized and prioritized with Twitter lists, hashtags, and Tweetdeck.

Twitter Lists

A few months ago, Twitter introduced a feature that allows users to organize the people they are following into lists. While you’re logged in to twitter.com you’ll see a section in the right sidebar titled lists with an option below it to create a new list. Lists can be private: only you can see who is on the list or public: everyone can see who is on the list. I keep most of my lists private in effort not to offend anyone. I have a variety of lists to sort people by how I found/know them and what topics they mainly tweet about.

Hashtags

Hashtags are keywords or phrases preceded by the # symbol in a tweet. Hashtags are used for groups of people to discuss certain topics or upcoming events so that all the related tweets can easily be grouped together. If you’re replying to a tweet that includes a hashtag and you want all the other hashtag followers to be able to read your reply, make sure to include the hashtag in your reply (Tweetdeck will do this automatically for you).

Putting it all together in Tweetdeck

tweetdeckTweetdeck allows you to create columns to group updates by social network (I use Tweetdeck for Facebook and Foursquare as well as Twitter), lists, hashtags, searches, and many other items.

With the Tweetdeck window maximized to take up my entire computer screen I can see 5 full columns at once (ok, so I wrote that in regards to my 15″ MacBook Pro; on the 27″ iMac I can see almost 10 full columns and that’s information overload so I had to make the window smaller). I’ve prioritized my columns so that the ones that are most important to me to keep up with are on the left and I can scroll right to check out the less important columns as it is convenient and interesting for me to so.

So when I open Tweetdeck, I see:

  • Facebook (keeping up with my real life friends is a priority over Twitter for me)
  • Twitter mentions and direct messages (Twitter communications with or about me)
  • my exclamation mark list (the Twitter people I most want to keep up with)
  • and then the hashtag columns start…

I’ve currently got columns for 9 hashtags mostly related to blogging and some upcoming events I’m attending. I’m interested in reading these things but if I don’t have the time or interest to keep up with all these tweets that is a-okay.

After the hashtags I’ve got:

  • my Twitter “All Friends” column which contains the 200 most recent tweets among all of the people I’m following on Twitter (there’s no way I could constantly keep up with that column but sometimes I scroll through and see if I have anything to add to those conversations)
  • New Followers (I do check out everyone individually and see if I want to follow back but I usually do this in just one batch a day so it’s not a priority for me to see those right away)
  • Foursquare (which is occasionally interesting but the major advantage of this column is that it removes all the Foursquare check in updates from your other columns and keeps them neater)

One feature I’d really, really love for Tweetdeck to introduce that would make this system even more efficient would be if I’ve marked a tweet as read in one column, it’d be marked as read in all of my columns because some of the same tweets currently show up in 3 or 4 columns.

How do you organize and prioritize your use of Twitter?

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