During the past year, many mobile social networking fans have at least wanted to adopt the Foursquare app. However, in its earliest incarnation, its only availability had been for the iPhone and in the form of a web interface which was not so simple to navigate. Foursquare then called upon its development staff to design apps for other mobile platforms, which resulted in a new app for the Android.

April 2009 saw developers Joe LaPenna and Chris Brummel begin coding the app in their spare time. At first, they needed to reverse engineer the workings of the iPhone version to discover how to set up an Android app based upon it. Then, according to Mr. LaPenna, they needed to migrate the app to Android using Foursquare’s beta API. After working on the app for several months, LaPenna, Brummel, and Foursquare’s app manager, Naveen Selvadurai, completed the engineering to the point that consumers could comfortably install and use Foursquare on the Android.

Although the Foursquare for Android resembles its iPhone predecessor, the new version contains features not found there. The Android app includes, for example, integrated maps and one-click check in with friends that iPhone users do not have. These interfaces make the new variation more user friendly and social by allowing a user to see where friends are and find out what they’d like to do more quickly than users of the old version. Other than that and the unique Android look and feel to the app, it treats friends check in lists and badge displays the same as its iPhone cousin.

Foursquare could have set up its Android app to run in the background on that platform, but chose to do otherwise. Foursquare claims it gives the devices better speed and battery life since the program would not be running when the user is otherwise occupied. This does show logic based upon the company’s previous ideas, though, as those who use it generally prefer to check in manually with others in the process of seeking information about with whom to meet and where to go.

The fact of the Android version of Foursquare being open-source and in the app store now will excite those who wish to adopt it earlier than most since Android phones have gained popularity. The developers have posted user information on the Google Code Page and as documentation for first time users. The Android App can be found for free in the Android Market or downloaded from the Google Code Page to be installed by more advanced users to suit their specs. Of course, as users grab the app and give feedback to Foursquare, the company plans upgrades in the future, beginning with revisions of the app’s performance and user interface, although the developers continue working on which aspect to advance first. Thus, as Foursquare’s mobile connectivity app spreads into new territory with an Android app, more people will discover new ways of setting up meetings with friends and making socializing on the go easier.

Buzz, meant to be Google’s answer to Facebook and Twitter, takes communicating with friends to a new level by integrating location services with it. However, Buzz still needs some tweaking to make it fully functional and more user-friendly. Buzz even brings all of those ideas to the mobile community on both the iPhone and Android platforms, making it a powerful tool for getting around and finding one’s friends. What makes these mobile apps so successful in keeping people connected?

Buzz came along and upstaged Google’s own location based Latitude service. Many users prefer the fact that Buzz does not always run in the background as Latitude does. This grants them greater privacy by allowing them to check in with friends rather than have everyone in the social group know where they are at all times. Like Foursquare and Gowalla, Buzz lets the user tell it where and when a location is sent out, making it simpler to use in finding one’s way around. To check-in, the user of the service presses a button on the device, and his or her location is transmitted to the others in the group, giving each control of when to display information.

This checking-in concept is built into Buzz for the mobile devices. Users buzz from the device and are allowed to tag the buzz, attaching it to a place while sending the information to friends. By giving people the opportunity to check in in this way, the services function better for transmitting location. Rather than giving out coordinates of where someone is, which are meaningless to many people, check-in services feature an option whereby the user can select an exact place, sending its name in the message to those he or she wishes to meet there. Maps provided by Google enable Buzz users to search for and find directions to the locations provided by friends, making the more efficient in getting there and giving the groups more time to catch up with one another.

Current users find Buzz to be a much better check-in and location service than social network. Many suggest using it as an Android and iPhone app for finding locations, perhaps linking it to people’s Google profiles. By doing so, Google would more easily add in the desired social feature needed to connect groups of friends before they meet in person. Unfortunately, Buzz does a better job of sharing information within Google’s Gmail so their internal users connect rather than reaching out to other networks and bringing together more of the world.

Thus, one can see how Buzz tries to rival other social sharing networks. Although it does well in the mobile market among Android and iPhone fans, Google needs to bring Buzz to other platforms and the point where people can socialize and discuss plans as well as looking up venues on maps. Until those changes come about, users will have to be content with checking in and meeting up with friends much as they would use a GPS tool.

Google dropped a bomb shell on the internet world yesterday as it announced a couple of new ways for users to search the net. The more prominent announcement entails the use of realtime data from the social media communities of Facebook, Twitter, and mySpace.

So what could this mean for us? How will it shape our online world? While there are dozens of implications, 5 reasons come quickly to mind in how Google’s real time search will change our virtual world.

1. Real Time Answers - Ever look for information on the net, only to find that the only piece information you could muster up was from 1991? While this may be great if you are working on a history project, current technology based information needs to be fresh in order to be accurate. A real time search engine could prevent this by giving you access to more prominent data from users in large social communities -such as Facebook and Twitter.

2. Public Opinion on Current Events – Find out what real people are saying about current events – and not just overhyped or bias press. As the event unfolds people on the scene that contribute to Twitter and other social communities will become prevalent in the search engine results, allowing you to better form your own judgments, contribute to the conversation and find the social community that has the best information for you.

3. Cost Effective Marketing – Companies that have a good product or service can make use of real time search by asking satisfied customers to speak out about their brand. If Company XYZ sells product M, and 3000 people are updating there status about how great it is, Company XYZ essentially saved thousands of dollars from branding themselves through traditional means.

4. Faster Shopping Online – Are you looking for a certain book to read? Want to know what people are saying about it now- before you spend that twenty dollar bill? With real-time search capabilities you will get answers from various people in the social communities quickly, and not have to search all over the net to compare and contrast product reviews. Needless to say this will dramatically increase the speed in which you can shop online for products and services.

5. Higher Customer Satisfaction – With the social web – Companies are just a few clicks away from being rendered a hero or a complete z… well you get it. Let’s face it, people enjoy telling their social communities what they thought of a particular product or service – good or bad. With real-time results this information will weigh heavy on company’s to maintain a competitive advantage and truly strive satisfy their customers needs.

Google announced yesterday that is has overhauled the news to cater to iPhone, Android, and Palm Pre users. With this new overhaul comes a user interface that displays more images, news and their sources. Google also promises “you can now reach your favorite sections, discover new ones, find articles and play videos in fewer clicks. If you are an existing Google News reader on desktop, you will find that all of your personalizations are honored in this mobile version too.”

This all comes in 29 different languages with over 70 different versions avaliable.

After testing the new functionality of the mobile version, I was quite impressed how everything was slimmed down and pretty easy to find.

The “Jump To” feature – located in the top right header of each section – appears to be using some internal page links that allows you to quickly find the topic of interest without endless scrolling.

Now all they need to do is integrate a retweet button and users will have the chance to spread the word, at a much more rapid rate.

There is no denying it – Twitter is big! At the end of October, both Microsoft and Google made separate announcements that they would be incorporating live Twitter streams into their search engine results. This means that both Bing and Google would offer ways for web users to search within the Twitter annals just as they would the World Wide Web. Twitter already has its own search engine (search.twitter.com) but this new addition is absolutely huge for the social networking platform as well as these companies.

So, what does this actually mean to everyone else? When two of the most influential web giants decide to incorporate social networking into their search engines, it gives web users an advantage. Not only will the usual web results be combined with news, images, and other searches, information will also be available from wherever it is being produced!

Another way of looking at including social networking information into the major search engines is that whatever you post as a member is no longer confined to the particular social network in which you published it. This means that a lot more people than you realize may be watching what your tweeting. While this is great for those that want to self-promote, it can have repercussions for others. Just remember to try and not say something unsavory- as it may come back to bite you later!

The interesting aspect of both Bing and Google integrating Twitter’s micro-blogging into their respective search engine results is that both claim to offer real-time searches. This means that items you’ve tweeted about within the last hour would likely become visible online, for all to see, much faster than it is now. If you want to spread the word about something, this is quite exhilarating!

The possibility of a real-time Twitter search offered by Bing and Google might step on the toes of some of the up-and-coming real-time search engines out there. Such engines actually rely on Twitter, and other social sites, for their content and results. If Bing and Google are successful, these search engines may go the way of the dinosaurs. If they don’t want to face certain extinction, they’ll pursue higher levels of creativity and innovation.

The announcement of the Twitter integration of both Bing and Google brings about another question. Will Google eventually get access to FaceBook’s stream of updates? As Microsoft and Google are competitors of sorts, Microsoft has a leg up in that it already has a deal with FaceBook, though it is not exclusive.

While the collaboration between Twitter and two of the largest search engines may be quite exciting, there will be some limitations, especially at first. For a pure search, you may still be better off using Twitter’s own search engine when you want to find something within the Twitter streams specifically. Bing and Google may or may not refine their searches to dig deep within the Twitter tweets, though we can’t comment until we see it in action and test it out.

100 Million to the Twitter Corp

According to various sources on the net – this past week – Twitter received 100 million in funding to bring the Corporation to a whooping 1 billion dollar value. Investors Insight Venture Partners, T. Rowe Price, Institutional Venture Partners, Spark Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Morgan Stanley initially wished to remain private about the deal until Friday Sep 25, 2009.

Which begs the question, why? Why would anyone invest this type of capital into a business for only 10% stake in a corporation that has yet to implement a solid revenue generating plan? Is there an Initial Public Offer waiting around the corner? Does twitter have an ace up its sleeve? …

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According to co-founder Biz Stone, Twitter has no intentions of pushing ads on this site this year. Instead their main focus will be on creating business accounts that will offer a subset of additional features such as improved search capabilities…

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13 Percent of all medical students taking part in a recent survey by the Journal of the American Medical Association reported a breach in doctor patient confidentiality by posting confidential information publicly online.
The survey conducted consisted of 60% of all US medical schools – in which – 60% percent of all respondents reported posting “unprofessional content” online.
Since no official policies have been created – schools have not been able to take official action against students…

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In an effort to better optimize Facebook ads Nielson plans to implement a new advertising measuring tool, dubbed BrandLift. BrandLift will basically work by eliciting users with annoying survey questions on a purely volunteer basis. This comes after – what many have determined to be a failure on the part of Facebook to successfully manage client advertising campaigns…

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While ATT&T stands fast with the notion that they had no part in rejecting Google Voice App from the iPhone, they are complaining to the FCC about how Google Voice should operate.
ATT&T claims that Google Voice should operate exactly as ATT&T does, even though the Google Voice uses a the internet to run its service…

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Intel introduced its new Light Peak technology earlier this past week. What is light peak you ask? Light peak is a new form of blazing fast optical data transfer that is said to be 10x as fast as your current gigabit ethernet cable (the one for your internet connection ). The rate at which data can travel over this optical cable is somewhere around 10 Gbps.
It is have been unveiled by Engadget that Apple plans to replace all computer ports with this new technology and has been the driving force behind this new innovation since 2007.

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Tweeter Changes Terms of Service – Twitter announces its terms of service changes – publicly on its blog. Making it clear that you own your own tweets, the advertising door is left open, SPAM will not be tolerated (as usual) and they are still working on guidelines for APIs.

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Google posted today that it added a little flair to the popular Google Docs application – by allowing you to translate your text into 42 different languages.

The translation process is overwhelmingly easy, after you are finished typing up a document, highlight the area you need translated. Next go to the “Tools” menu select the “Translate document” submenu and select your the new language. Google docs will then open a new document with the translated text and give you the option to save a copy or overwrite the original file.

While this new feature will certainly help a lot of people with friends and family in different parts of the world, it should be noted that it is not a perfect translation. Google also stated that they will be “improving translation quality over time”.

Twitter Plans to Add GeoData to your Tweets

In a blog post on Thursday Biz Stone announced that they will be adding a geolocation feature to Twitter that will be first rolled out to developers. With this option users will be able to turn on an optional location aware feature that will add GeoData to your tweets (latitude and longitude). This sounds both fun and dangerous at the same time. On one hand it would be nice to use with family and friends, on the other hand if rouge users have access to your twitter feed, this opens the door for personal attacks.

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Twitter Plans to Bring in Revenue From Businesses

Twitter is hoping to have the processes in place by the end of they year to charge business users’ a fee for added account features. While users and companies will still have the option to sent tweets for free, the added features will include a subset of special tools to assist businesses in tracking the effectiveness of their tweets.

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Facebook: First Cyber Bully to be Put in Jail

Vile Keeley Houghton, now 18, was the first person in Britain to be put in jail for cyber bullying via Facebook. In her taunts she threatened victim Emily Moore stating the she was an actress and she was going to murder her …

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Facebook is now allowing Status updates to be Sent to Twitter

Facebook announced that it will allow Public figures and Businesses to post profile updates to Twitter. The company feels that they often go tweet the same information so this would basically save them a step in the process …

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Phishing Apps Found on Facebook

Trend Micro reported that they found a some phishing apps on Facebook that sent users to other rouge sites (as most do). These sites would then ask for your login information, to steal your Facebook credentials. While Facebook has since removed these apps, this seriously questions the integrity of the Facebook application review process. I mean if they let these apps in and were not aware of their activity, who is to say there are not 100s even 1000s of these apps on Facebook right now…

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Apple, AT&T and Google the Google Voice iPhone Saga Continues

Much buzz was created around the net when Apple supposedly rejected Google’s Voice App from being available in the iPhone App store. Now that the FCC has decided to intercede into Apple’s magical app selection process – Apple claims the App is not rejected. They claim that they are still analyzing the app to see if it does not alter the iPhones core phone functionality.
AT&T remains adamant stating they have nothing to do with the Google Voice App rejection and they really have nothing to do with the app approval process from a contract stand point.

Outed Google blogger Rosemary Port To Sue Google

A media storm was created over some blog posts that referred to model Liskula Cohen as “The Skankiest in NYC”. A court ordered Google to release the IP address of the once phantom blogger responsible in order find their identity. Google initially fought to keep this information private but needless to say was unsuccessful.
Rosemary Port the owner of the blog Skanks of NYC, now plans to sue Google claiming they “breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity”.

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Google announced yesterday that they now have a group of widgets for your iGoogle page that will allow you to interact better with your peers. Currently they feature 19 different widgets that include chess, scrabble, flixster, trivia, photo sharing and more.

iGoogle was implemented in 2005 to allow users to customize their own person page to include various widgets. These widgets feature a wide range of functionality from getting weather reports to finding information about movies playing in your local area. A similar concept was first introduced by Yahoo! referred to as My Yahoo!.

So How do these gadgets let you interact with your peers?

Google reports that you can share information on the different widgets if your friends have the same widget on their page or through a new feed service they have dubbed Updates. Google recently posted the following information about how to use the Update technology.

Updates can include your recently shared photo albums, your favorite comics strips, your travel plans for the weekend and more. To help you manage who you are sharing with, we’ve created a Friends group. You can add and edit friends in this group at any time. If you already have a Friends group within your Google Contacts, you’ll be able to easily share with those friends on iGoogle as well. If you don’t care to share, iGoogle’s social features are optional and can be disabled on a gadget-to-gadget basis with just a few clicks.

While Google’s attempts to go social in the past have not been meet with much success, maybe these social widgets will allow the search giant to gain some traction before releasing the new Google Wave service.

Google released a beta version of a new search engine that engineers have been working on in secrecy over the past several months dubbed Caffeine. While most people will not notice any aesthetic differences, many developers have said the new google search engine is a lot faster.
Google claims that the new search engine architecture will go far beyond the current Google search and will push the “envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Google has stated that the new project has yet to be fully completed and is asking that web developers and “power searchers” test the new project out here http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and give Google your feedback.

It should be noted that Google does not want just any feedback and includes the following in their recent blog post.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (”These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system”) in addition to “This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.” Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.

Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Initial testing of both search engines (Caffeine and normal Google) using the keyword iphone (all lower case), has shown slightly different results in the SERPs (search engine results pages). Most Notably is the number of indexed pages in both search engines. Normal Google (decaffeinated) displayed 357,000,000 results for the term. While Caffeine displayed 458,000,000, giving validity to the initial blog announcement – where the size envelope will be pushed.

What will this mean for search engine optimization experts and other search engine marketing gurus? At this point it is too early to tell since the project has been pushed out in a fashion to elicit user and developer feedback. While this is not a Google Lab product (notorious for pooping up and then just dying off), feedback from users could ultimately change the direction of the project.

The engineers at Google plan on doing routine maintenance on Saturday, August 8. So if you have an AdSense account- don’t be alarmed if you can not access your user interface. Google ensures us that all people running AdSense ads will still get credit for ad clicks and impressions will be recorded.

The planed maintenace schedule is as follows:

United States – 10am to 2pm PDT

London – 6pm Saturday

Athens – 8pm Saturday

Mumbai – 10:30pm Saturday

Kuala Lumpur – 1am Sunday

Melbourne – 3am Sunday

To find out more about scheduled maintenance go here…

Has this every happened to you? You find a new site that offers you really great information. You end up subscribing to their newsletter only to find that its not what you thought it would be. Or better yet it was what you thought it was but you interests have changed.
So what do you do? Do you track down the site where the newsletter came from and search endlessly for the coveted “unsubscribe to newsletter” form? Or do you give up and mark the message as spam, so you that it is one less message you have to sift through on your daily adventures to your gmail box?

Whatever you do, the guys at gmail realize that this can be a problem for many. So they have added a new unsubscribe feature to gmail to help alleviate some time for you and some wrongful spam claims for legitimate companies.

Using this feature is pretty straight forward. When you are tired of seeing these nuisances just mark the message as spam, like you normally would. A pop-up window will surface in the middle of the browser asking you if you would like to mark the message as spam or unsubscribe. Its pretty seamless at this point.

It is important to note that the unsubscribe feature is not instant and it may take a few days for the Google Gods to process your request. In addition this feature is not available for all companies just yet.

(Source cnet)

According to a recent blog post in the official Gmail blog, Gmail Labs will now include a spiffy little key icon next to emails that it deems the sender to be “Super-Trustworthy” . This is Google’s latest attempt to keep you safe from phishing scams -where the “phishers” attempt to elicit your PayPal or eBay password from you in an official looking email. You know the one that says click on this url to update your user info or your account will be deleted.
Currently they only have this “Super-Trustworthy” status for emails that come from PayPal and eBay, but plan to have more companies added in the future.

In case your are wondering what exactly does “Super-Trustworthy” mean, the Gmail Spam Czar, Brad Taylor wrote this in his recent blog post,

Super-trustworthy” is a technical term I just invented that means: (1) the sender, usually a financial institution, is a target of phishers, (2) all of the sender’s email is authenticated with DKIM, and (3) Gmail rejects any fake messages that claim to come from this sender, but actually don’t.

It should also be noted that if you want this feature to work in your Gmail, you will have to turn it on by going to your settings link (in the top right corner of your gmail account). Then go to the labs subtab/link, scroll down from about 30 secs (there are a lot of features here) till you eventually see the “Authentication icon for verified senders” . From here click the “enable” radio button, scroll to the bottom of the page and hit the save changes button.

When you are completed you should see something like the screen shot below in your PayPal and Ebay emails….