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Editor’s Note: this is a guessay, a portmanteau of the words “guess” and “essay”, which means that I’m officially making this stuff up.I remember it very clearly. Four of us were getting together for breakfast last year at SXSW. We were waiting for a cab, and we started sharing our Twitter stories.
Each of us had one…mine was that I had used Twitter to find a room to share. Someone else had used it to find a ride from Dallas to Austin. Yet someone else had used Twitter to plan this very breakfast. We had used Twitter in ways that it was never imagined to be used, getting real value from it.
It was at that point that I started to think about Twitter as something other than a fun little SMS tool. It had real use, and the ability to shoot messages out to a larger audience was extremely valuable. I also started to wonder if Twitter might be the game-changer that finally put some heat on Google…the favorite conjecture of recent times is “Who is the next Google killer?”.
Well, I think I figured out how Google will be “killed”. Or, more precisely, their dominance will be eroded by Twitter and Facebook.
Read the remainder of this guessay at Joshua's blog here
If you have a Facebook account and would like to join the group, click through here
Google has a site called Google Transit, that acts as a Google Maps of sorts for buses and trains in rural and urban areas of the United States. If you've never seen it before, go check it out on the link posted below. The program has been adopted by the New York City transit authority (Metro), among many others. More importantly, for those of you with iPhones, if you go to the maps application, you can get transit (bus, train) directions to your destinations. This feature uses Google Transit data and maps.
Unfortunately, for some reason the MBTA is still not on the program. All that needs to happen is for the MBTA to get in touch with Google to list their buses and trains on the website.
I've created this group to raise support, interest, and awareness for the fact that people want the MBTA on Google Transit. It seems so simple and frankly, the Boston area as a whole looks a little silly for not having their transit authority's buses and trains listed on the website.
So... invite all your friends, anyone who rides the T, or simply someone who feels that this is a logical and simple step to more accessibility for the MBTA and Boston.
Of course, you don't have to be a drunk, a thief or a bitter failure for this to backfire. Everything you do now ends up in your permanent record. The best plan is to overload Google with a long tail of good stuff and to always act as if you're on Candid Camera, because you are.Read the full posting on Seth's blog here.
did you see the Google home page today? They turned the lights out!Google users in the United States will notice today that we "turned the lights out" on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. As to why we don't do this permanently - it saves no energy; modern displays use the same amount of power regardless of what they display. However, you can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative.
On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.
Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.
Focusing on one patent on transportation routing, he told a gathering at last week's AIIM conference in Boston that he sees not only a business opportunity for Google in transportation routing, but also the tip of a proverbial iceberg in the way the search engine colossus approaches much of its business.
"No one knows what these guys at Google are up to," said Arnold, who has written two books on Google, in an interview this week. "That's why their patents are so important."
Arnold, who takes an investigative approach to Google without help from the company, says the transportation routing patent is already embodied in Google's employee bus system in the Bay Area. Using Google's mapping technology, GPS location finding linked with Google employee cell
phones , the buses and employees are connected efficiently in real time. Employees are informed wirelessly when their bus is approaching. Another iteration of the system appears to be in use at a Google facility in Korea, Arnold added.While the system is useful now for the company, Arnold believes it can have wider use in larger transportation routing systems including highway systems and air traffic. The approach spelled out in the patent could have use anywhere routing is important, even in the spacing of cell phone towers, Arnold said.
Bold for my emphasis.
What if Franklin's new bus used this? The route runs along King St. I could use it to get to the train station if it was allowed to stop along the way. How many more people could use the bus this way?After just two short weeks of testing on Blogger in draft, OpenID commenting is now available for all Blogger blogs. This means that your friends and readers can leave authenticated comments on your blog using their blog URLs from OpenID-enabled services such as WordPress.com, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals, or with their AOL/AIM accounts.For those who comment here, you may have noticed a change this week as this was implemented.
We've chosen a few popular OpenID providers to highlight on the comments form, but OpenID is, well, "open"! You can use any OpenID service to post a comment by choosing "Any OpenID" and filling in your OpenID URL.
