Alert Blog Reviews

What’s with Google and their constant upgrades and innovations? What is it with these guys? You would think that they are trying to improve and stuff. The latest, and personally I think one of the coolest, service introductions is the “Near You Now” feature on Google.com for mobile. It’s pretty simple. Your location is known by Google (if you allow it of course) so it simply tells you what is “near you now” with regard to restaurants, local services (i.e. animal hospitals, dentists, drugstores, gyms, parking lots etc), coffee shops, lodging, shopping and a lot more. Google’s blog tells us a bit more : “Near me now” was designed to address two user problems. First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you’re standing right in front of a business or if it’s just a short walk away. Second, we wanted to make searching for popular categories of nearby places really simple. Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don’t see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using “Near me now”. To search other categories of places not shown, “Browse more categories” provides access to our local search product with more category choices. Pretty slick. Watch out other local apps like Yelp. This one really works although I can’t figure out why my location keeps coming up with Chinese characters but I’ll survive (neither me or my iPod have been to China unless that’s where it was “born”?). Anyway, “Near me now” is currently available in the US for iPhone (OS 3.x) or Android-powered devices with version 2.0.1 or later. While this video demo is one of the cheesiest ever, it does show how the service works. Try to ignore the music, I dare you.

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Google Tells What is “Near You Now”

Digital creative agency Collective has unveiled their ‘Naughty or nNce’ Twitter-driven app, featuring their very own Collective Santa . Users can find out whether they’ve made it onto Santa’s Naughty or Nice List before discovering what they deserve in return. Visitors enter their Twitter username to wake Santa from his snooze. They can then watch as Santa checks their tweets for various naughty or nice key words while he boogies to the music. Once the results are in, Santa responds by telling the user if they are naughty or nice and what they deserve this Christmas (anything from a “ruddy good talking to” to “a little donkey”). If the user has been naughty, they’ll be encouraged to add some Christmas cheer to their tweets and try again. Results are shared on Collective Santa’s Twitter page and can also be shared on the user’s Twitter or other social networking pages. The user can also choose to add a new naughty or nice profile picture to show all their followers. Greg Doone, managing director of Collective, comments: “It’s great to see Santa embracing new technologies like Twitter, and we’re delighted to have helped him make his naughty and nice list this year. By the way, is there any chance I could have an iPhone 3Gs please?” Look for @CollectiveSanta on Twitter. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . Spread Christmas Cheer with ‘Naughty or Nice’ Twitter App

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Spread Christmas Cheer with ‘Naughty or Nice’ Twitter App

On Twitter, you have 140 characters to play with. Most people stick to the 26 letters, 10 numbers, half a dozen punctuation marks and currency signs. Fact is, underneath your fingers there are a treasure trove of characters to make your tweets more interesting, shorter & more colourful. By making your tweets stand out, you will get more people actively reading them because subconsciously your eyes are drawn to them. If your tweets are useful (and I’ve no reason to doubt why they should be), you should end up with more clicks on links, more retweets and generally more twitter love. Here’s a few of my favourite special characters that I like to put in Tweets. I explain how to get them on the most common form of keyboards – the US Keyboard Layout (which is used by the most of the western world). If different, I will also include the UK keycode, between them that should cover most of the keyboards in English speaking countries, but if English isn’t your native language, these may be different . The characters are there, but you’ll have to dig to find them. 1. The Ampersand How To Get It: Press Shift + 7 When Should You Use It? This character is very simple, as it shortens the word “and” to 1 character, saving yourself two characters in the process. 2. The “At” Sign How To Get It: UK Keyboards – Shift+’ US Keyboards – Shift+2 When You Should Use It? Used all the time in emails, the @ sign can also be used for events (for example, the show begins @ 7pm). Saving yourself one character in the process. 3. The Asterix How to Get It: Press Shift + 8 When You Should Use It? This is one I use all the time for emotions, verbs, basically what I am doing. If I’m writing **smiles and nods**, I’m smiling and nodding. This is great in conveying how I feel about things, as well as emotions that are difficult to convey such as sarcasm. 4. The Music Symbol (Joined Quavers) How to Get It: Hold Alt & Type 14 When You Should Use It? I’ve begun seeing this more and more when people are talking about music & songs they are listening to, particularly when using services such as Last.fm & Spotify . Often people will post music recommendations, followed with joined quavers, to show that it’s a musical link. It’s a great idea to do this, as it can be a text based warning to users, by saying “this link is a Spotify link, so a song will automatically play when opened”. This’ll stop users opening music links when they really shouldn’t be. 5. Hearts How to get it: Hold Alt & Type 3 When You Should Use It? The obvious place is by sharing a link that you love, or a twitterer you love, or anything you “More than like”. This negates the old

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8 Characters to Make Your Tweets Sparkle

What’s the name of that song? You know the one. They play it a lot at NC State football games? C’mon, you know it. “Boom, here comes the boom….” No? Forget it! I’ll Google it instead! Yes, that’s it! And, pretty soon, you’ll never have problems finding a song, artist, or album again–thanks to a new “Discover Music” onebox from Google. Maybe you remember only the chorus — or maybe you remember who sang it, but you forgot the exact name of the song. If you’ve ever heard a catchy song in a car or cafe, but just can’t figure out the name of the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This search feature also helps you find many of those songs by entering a search containing a line or two of lyrics. Cool, huh? Google has partnered with MySpace and Lala to source the results and Pandora, imeem, and Rhapsody are standing by to help you discover music related to your query. Not only does the Onebox show the result, but you can click the play button to activate the pop-up–and play the song! **Time out! Google is allowing pop-ups now? That’s the topic for a another blog post!** If you’re not seeing the results yet, Google has launched a music search site you can try out. The only thing missing? Maybe a partnership with Shazam , so I can play music to Google and have it recognize it–without me knowing anything about the song. That would be cool!

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Google Hits a High Note with New Music Onebox