Google has partnered with Rails-to-Trails (RTC), a nonprofit focused on creating a network of trails from former rail lines, to add biking directions to Google Maps.

Google Maps now has biking route details for more than 150 U.S. cities covering more than 12,000 miles of trails and bike lanes. Google says it plans to continue to add new trail information to Google Maps and is requesting feedback from riders via the "Report a Problem" tool.

The new feature allows Google Maps users to type in their destination and receive directions for the best bicycling route. Google says its algorithm is weighted to prefer routing on trails instead of roads open to automobile traffic as long as it won’t take cyclists too far out of the way.

"We’re thrilled to be working with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to make RTC’s extensive bike trail data available through Google Maps and Google Earth," says Shannon Guymon, Product Manager for Google Maps.

"Bikers all over the country now will be able to explore new trails or find specific directions in their local community with just a few clicks of their mouse."

Google has partnered with Rails-to-Trails (RTC), a nonprofit focused on creating a network of trails from former rail lines, to add biking directions to Google Maps.

Google Maps now has biking route details for more than 150 U.S. cities covering more than 12,000 miles of trails and bike lanes. Google says it plans to continue to add new trail information to Google Maps and is requesting feedback from riders via the "Report a Problem" tool.

The new feature allows Google Maps users to type in their destination and receive directions for the best bicycling route. Google says its algorithm is weighted to prefer routing on trails instead of roads open to automobile traffic as long as it won’t take cyclists too far out of the way.

"We’re thrilled to be working with Rails-to-Trails Conservancy to make RTC’s extensive bike trail data available through Google Maps and Google Earth," says Shannon Guymon, Product Manager for Google Maps.

"Bikers all over the country now will be able to explore new trails or find specific directions in their local community with just a few clicks of their mouse."

Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

Sponsor

How Will Facebook’s Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.”

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook’s Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

Discuss

Let me start off by saying that I have no problem with my search results being personalized, because I understand that search engines want to deliver the best user experience so that users will keep using them. If I get results that are personalized well, that means I don’t have to look too far for what I’m trying to find. However, not all users are so thrilled with the evolution of search results pages, particularly with the personalization aspect.

This week, Google announced the launch of a new feature that lets users star their search results for ones they like. This would lead to the starred results appearing at the top of the SERP in future searches, when appropriate. The feature is still rolling out, so if you don’t see it yet, you should see it soon.

After reporting on this change, we received comments from readers like:

"I really am getting hacked off with this bloody personalised search thing… the serps are full of bloody crap for 50% of searches and ultimately less relevent than before."

"I’m getting tired of Google forcing things on me. Over and over and over after I have said I do not want to be recognized for my geographical locations, it keeps asking me."

I’m guessing comments like these aren’t limited to this particular instance. I doubt that they represent the majority of opinions about Google’s SERP changes, but it does raise an interesting question: Is Google trying too hard to improve? To answer this with a yes, would indicate that Google’s results are already perfect (or were at least), and while Google has had a pretty good reputation for delivering quality results (and the market share to back it up), I don’t know if anyone would go so far as to call them perfect, including Google itself.

There is always room for improvement. Things can always get better. Some ideas work, and others don’t. Sometimes you don’t know until you try, and if certain concepts don’t go over well with the majority, sometimes they are scrapped. In fact, the very release of this starring feature also represents the end of a less successful feature in Google’s SearchWiki.

As for personalized search itself, I wouldn’t count on it going away anytime soon. I wouldn’t count on Google (or the other search engines for that matter) spending less time trying to improve in this area. Why would you want them to? If your results are tailored to you specifically, does that not increase their chances of being more relevant to you?

If privacy is a concern, remember, you can always look at the Google Dashboard and look at everything Google has stored about you from each of the company’s products that you may use.

Do you like personalized search? Should search engines continue to innovate in this area? Share your thoughts here.

Google just launched the latest developer version of Chrome, which now includes preliminary support for Google’s the W3C’s geolocation API. Google’s Geolocation API allows developers to pinpoint your computer’s location by looking at the WiFi networks around you,

similar to SkyHook’s technology that is part of Apple’s OSX and iPhone OS. For now, this new feature is still hidden behind a command line toggle and only available in the developer builds for Windows and OSX Leopard (it doesn’t work on Snow Leopard yet).

Sponsor

To enable these built-in geolocation features, you have to run the browser with “–enable-geolocation.” It’s typical for Google to first hide these features behind a command line toggle before exposing them to a wider group of testers. The Chrome team also notes that the geolocation UI is still incomplete and that Chrome will forget the permissions you set.

Preparing for Chrome OS?

It makes sense for Google to enable geolocation for Chrome, especially given the impending release of the Chrome OS, which will also benefit from these new features. Mozilla already offers a built-in location API for Firefox and with Geosense for Windows, Windows 7 developers can now also make use of Google’s Geolocation API in their native apps.

Location for Every Browser

Thanks to the current efforts by most browser developers, location APIs will soon become ubiquitous and hopefully more developers will make use of them. While a number of mobile apps for the iPhone, for example, now make use of the location feature in the mobile version of Safari, only a small number of browser-based apps are currently aware of your location. While using WiFi location isn’t quite as precise as using a GPS, the precision is usually much better than relying on a user’s IP address.

For more of our thoughts about location as a platform, also have a look at this post: The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived.

Discuss

Millions of people around the world don’t know what a browser is, they don’t know the difference between a search bar and an address bar and they sure don’t follow the finer points of Google’s many little changes it makes to their search results. They go to the Google and they type in Facebook login. Then they click on the links that show up, sometimes with very humorous results.

Google today introduced a new feature that will let mainstream users get search results to hold still and remain where they expect them to be. It’s called Stars and it’s essentially pinning a link permanently to the top of a search results page for a certain query.

Sponsor

Above: Probably not how this feature will generally be used.

When one of our blog posts showed up high in a Google search last month for “Facebook login” we saw hundreds of thousands of confused people stream into our site and post typo-ridden comments like “I WANT MY FAFEBOOK!” Many of them couldn’t tell that they were visiting a blog post about Facebook, and with Facebook Connect login, and not Facebook.com itself. Even though we said as much in big bold letters after the first few thousand of them.

Thousands more people visited the site to gawk at those users and their comments. A common response was for web designers to say “we must not be serving mainstream users very well if they are confused in a situation like this.”

Enter features like Google Stars. It’s a great idea. No dumbing-down the internet for those lucky relative few of us who do know how to use it, just some additional options for those who are still beginning to learn. Expect to see more developments like this as regular web use becomes a more common experience for non technical people. This may be an example of a best-case solution.

Update: Several people in comments have said they don’t think Stars are going to work for mainstream users, either. What do you think?

Discuss

Today, Twitter took the wraps off a new feature of the site. When logging in, it prompts the user to set defaults on being discovered with their email address or mobile phone number. It’s called “Be Found on Twitter”. Our contact at Twitter told us that, like many new features, this will show up for some users today and others soon.

Up to this point, Twitter allows people to create a persona for themselves that may not be directly correlated to the real world. You can’t do that on Facebook (assuming that you’re following the terms and conditions). This change in settings – even if it is optional – represents a shift in how the service is working behind the scenes to connect people that already know each other. Personal data is moving in between the social networks and becoming a key part of cloud services.

Sponsor

Do You Want Followers? Default Settings Make it a Reality

So far, Twitter hasn’t offered a way to make this kind of connection easy. We believe the reason this service is being offered now is simple: Twitter wants to take your email inbox and turn it into relationships.

Below is the screen that popped up for Web client users of Twitter that are being offered this enhancement. (Note: Those are my personal email and mobile phone digits, but I chose to opt-out of the service. In case you want to contact me, email is still an option.)

Thinking a bit into the future, perhaps Twitter will offer to take my email folders and auto-magically create lists of users from the email accounts and phone numbers in them.

This all gets interesting in the context that Twitter lists are viewable to the outside world – and inbox settings are not. There still seems like more work to do to make this all make sense, but for now, it seems to be somewhere between Buzz and Facebook’s approach to connecting users to their intimate relationships.

The Reverse of Buzz, or, Do Memes have Cellphones

We can see the motivation for Twitter to launch this feature. One of the challenges the service has is also its greatest feature: no rules. Anyone, anything can have an account today: devices, dogs, spacecraft, germs, conferences. All of ‘em are out there somewhere and are one button away from being in your feed.

Something to think about in this mixed model of accounts, is that although the settings on Twitter are now moving towards discovering email and phone numbers for our contacts, we don’t expect the Cassini Saturn spacecraft to have a mobile phone number.

Although Twitter is amazing for finding information about the world in real time, one of the things that Twitter has lacked is stickiness with intimate contacts.

Trying to get folks use Twitter to connect to their real friends, people they work with, and family members is a part of the battle for the real-time Web. Facebook has unique features and momentum in this area (e.g. requiring your real name), and Google Buzz made a big move in connecting the inbox for millions of Gmail users to its social service.

API Makes it Harder to Create Harmonized Settings for Users

This is a great example of where Twitter, being so decentralized, has to rely on partners to roll out these types of features. Traditional Web users see these features offered by the company, but others – Seesmic, Tweetdeck, Tweetie – may not ever offer this feature in their client.

One thing to watch will be how Twitter evolves the terms of service and default settings as it ramps up its efforts to compete further for mind share in the real-time web.

Taking this all into consideration, do you want to be found on Twitter?

Discuss

All across the country, newspapers are shuttering and those that remain are closing down bureaus and pulling correspondents left and right. More and more, media outlets are relying on fewer sources for their information because of a lack of funding, but a number of websites have apepared to solve this problem.

One such crowd-funded website, Spot.Us, has released a series of new features today in it’s efforts to save us all from the closed minded future we’re currently facing.

Sponsor

First, here is how it works. Spot.Us gives freelance journalists a space to pitch their story idea, which the website’s users can then invest in. Then, if the story is purchased by a news organization, the donations are reimbursed. It’s like a micro-loan service for journalism.

The changes to the site include a widget, which allows individuals to show their support for a specific story on third-party websites, social networking connections for Twitter and Facebook, new organization of stories and a progress blog for each story on the site, to make it easier to keep track. Spot.Us has also said it is open to suggestions for other cities to be a part of, as it only operates in Los Angeles and the Bay area, currently. Most importantly, we think, Spot.Us has released a new feature concerning how “community-funded” journalism operates on a base level.

In an interesting twist, Spot.Us has recognized that there may be more to funding journalism than money itself, and now its users can pledge talent instead of cash. According to the press release on today’s new features, “Citizens who may not have financial resources or want to participate more actively, can now collaborate on a story through an assignment agreed upon by the primary journalist and the citizen.”

In addition to the widget, Spot.Us is looking to make an open API in the near future, “that would further enable journalists and communities to realize journalism through technology.” We think this could be a great addition, as the project could expand geographically according to where users would support it, in much the same organic fashion as stories are funded.

So far, the project has raised over $70,000 and funded 50 stories from more than 700 contributors. We hope these new features will only help to further the cause of community sourced and funded journalism. If we aren’t willing to pay after the fact, maybe we will be more willing to pay beforehand, since we’ll know what we’re buying.

Discuss

Seesmic will release a major update of its web-based Twitter client Seesmic Web today that will introduce a number of new features like drag and drop list management, TweetMeme integration, threaded conversations and a new way to view and manage your retweets. Seesmic Web now also includes a very handy new contact manager for Twitter.

With this new version, Seesmic Web continues to blur the line between desktop and web-based Twitter clients.

Sponsor

Drag and Drop List Creation

The nicest new feature in Seesmic Web is the ability to drag and drop contacts to any list. Compared to TweetDeck and other desktop tools, this makes managing and creating lists a lot easier and makes for a more efficient workflow.

Contact Manager

Another interesting new feature is the contact manager, which allows you to quickly get information about your followers. The contact manager displays the basic information from the user’s profile: number of followers and tweets, favorite tweets and information about the lists this user follows. In addition, Seesmic also displays the names of this user’s top 3 most publicly contacted friends on Twitter.

Better Integration with Third-Party Tools

One area the Seesmic team has focused on for this release is the integration of third-party tools. A small icon appears next to every shortened link now and clicking on this link will bring up some basic information about the link, including the name of the site the link will take you to and the number of retweets (powered by Tweetmeme).

Seesmic Web now also allows users to share pictures from the web interface and also offers picture previews right inside the app for pictures that were shared on most of the popular Twitter photo services.

Geolocation

As long as you use a browser that supports Google Gears, Seesmic Web now also makes it easier to share your location. Whenever you write a new tweet, you can choose to attach your location to this message. Just make sure you have the location feature turned on in your Twitter settings. As we reported last month, only a very small number of Twitter users currently makes use of this feature, which isn’t a surprise, given that only a handful of Twitter apps currently support this functionality. It’s good to see that Seesmic is making this feature a priority in its apps.

Verdict

Overall, the experience of using Seesmic Web comes very close to using a desktop client. There are a few features that are still missing in the web version (resizable columns, for example), but otherwise, Seesmic Web is a very good replacement for a desktop Twitter client.

Using a web-based client brings a number of advantages with it, including the absence of any Twitter rate limits. If you like the Seesmic interface give it a try in a site-specific browser like Fluid on the Mac or Mozilla’s Prism.

Discuss

While none of us here at ReadWriteWeb have yet to see it in our Google News, a tip this morning from blogger Joe Hobot tells us that trending topics may be coming to the search engine’s news aggregator.

We got in touch with Google this morning and a spokesman confirmed that the feature is indeed part of a series of experiments the company has been running since early this month.

Image thanks to Joe Hobot.

Sponsor

According to Chris Gaither, a spokesperson for Google, Search Engine Rountable first reported the potential feature’s appearence last Friday. Gaither said that trending topics are one of many experiments Google is conducting in their redesign of the news homepage.

At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on our websites all over the world. Right now, we are running a small test of a new Google News homepage design. More information about how Google runs experiments can be found [here].

Google last redesigned its news page last May, adding more visual content to the layout. This time around, we expect to see more in the way of real-time content, including features such as the trending topics seen here.

If you keep a close watch, it is possible you will see other new features that Google is testing, but as the company’s blog post points out, often these features will show up and go completely unnoticed. In Hobot’s case, the trending topics showed up for a brief period before disappearing again.

We asked about the specifics of the new feature, but Gaither said that statement included above is all the company is saying about it at this time.

Discuss

Today Amazon Web Services announced the availability of a new feature of their Simple Storage Service (S3).

Object Versioning now joins the ever growing list of features supported by S3. This proves once again that Amazon Web Services are listening to their customers and putting plenty of distance between them and their competition.

Sponsor

They Grow Up So Fast

In March 2006 Amazon publicly launched S3, the first of their web services. In doing so, they also unveiled their new Web Services division of their business.

The service will soon celebrate its 4th birthday; at its 3rd birthday over 59 billion objects had already been stored. That is approximately 10 objects for each person on the planet! By anyone’s standard, the service is successful.

Amazon S3 provides storage buckets that allow users to PUT files in and then GET them back later. Simple right?

Taking things beyond the simple GET and PUT might have a lot to do with S3’s success. Amazon has added many features making S3 suitable for many different use cases.

Pick and Mix Features

The different S3 features can be switched on and off for individual buckets allowing users to pick different features depending on what they want to do.

For example:

Backups – buckets can be private and because they are securely hosted by Amazon far away in the cloud, they are an ideal “other place” to store a copy of important files.

File Sharing – access controls can be used to white-list other users to have access to your buckets.

Content Distribution – buckets can be made publically available via HTTP. This makes it perfect for websites to offload the serving of static content such as images. The CloudFront feature takes this one step further and makes your content available to users via their nearest Amazon Internet presence; so a user in Japan or Europe would not have to download your content from servers in the USA.

Versioning (today’s announced feature) provides primitive version control of objects. When an existing file is uploaded to S3 it will create a new revision instead of overwriting the original. If you have ever accidentally deleted your backups you will appreciate the benefits of this feature! This simplifies the use of S3 for backups where you want to avoid overwriting a good backup with a corrupt one.

Many cloud storage companies support versioning (like DropBox and GitHub) and S3’s support should not be seen as a threat. It’s a required part of a mature storage offering, so it makes a lot of sense that S3 should support this too. Not in a “me too” kind of way, it genuinely plugs a gap in the Amazon Web Services storage offering and will undoubtedly be very useful for its users.

Is Time to Drop the “Simple”?

Unlike the beta label that some web services wear with pride, the “Simple” in S3 is telling of its humble beginnings. The simple days of just GET/PUT are definitely gone. Given the fun packed feature list, it must be time to drop the ’simple.’ Or should S3 be re-branded altogether?

Let’s crowdsource some suggestions:

• Amazon Fully-Featured Storage Service (F2S2)
• Amazon Storage Service Now All Grown Up (S2NAGU)

Can you think of any better ones?

Discuss

One of the hottest topics in the social media industry right now is the rumored launch of a new social feature for Google’s Gmail. The company is expected to announce a status timeline feature similar to Facebook and Twitter today that would be accessible through Gmail.

Do you think Google could make an impact on social media with this release? Share your thoughts.

So far, Google has been pretty tight-lipped on the details about the product, leaving ample room for speculation. Google has taken a lot of flack for "not being good at social media" in the past, a theory, which I have questioned myself, but even if you agree with this notion, you have to wonder where Google is going with this.

What Will This Feature Be?

It doesn’t sound like the feature will be a Gmail Labs feature, although we don’t yet know that for certain. If it is and has to be manually turned on, you can probably forget about the masses using it, at least until it graduates from that status.

The feature is said to allow Gmail users to view a stream of status updates from their contacts. Currently, Gmail users already have the ability to set a status update, but once it is changed, the old one goes away. It’s not an ongoing timeline like Facebook or Twitter. The new feature would presumably change that.

Possibilities for the Feature

Now for the fun part. What could this feature really be and what possibilities could it open up? The feature would surely be more successful if it is able to connect with Facebook and Twitter. Think about being able to do all of your social media and email communication from one place. That is something Mozilla is trying to develop with its in-progress Raindrop project. What if Google was able to do it with an established product like Gmail? Even if the product doesn’t launch with the ability to integrate Facebook and Twitter, who’s to say it will never happen?

What if Google starts integrating its own status updates into the real-time search results it presents in regular Google web searches? Why wouldn’t they do this? It’s another place to push content in this area, and potentially another huge source of information (let’s not forget Google’s mission to organize the world’s information).

Google would almost certainly integrate these into social search, which recently became part of the web search norm. Your Gmail contacts are the first people listed in your "social circle" that Google draws from for these results.

Google could potentially integrate the feature with any product it chooses (and it has a lot to choose from). What if it became available with the click of a button on the Chrome browser (which is gaining popularity)? What if it were integrated with the already social Google Reader? Google Docs? Maps? Latitude? Wave? There could be a Google gadget, for users’ iGoogle home pages.

What if it found its way onto the YouTube and Picasa video and photo sharing products? It’s already being said that videos and photos from these respective sites will be integrated into the product itself. What if it’s available right from those products?

What if there were an Android app for it? Android is also gaining a great deal of momentum in the mobile phone space, and status updates are one of the most popular activities on mobile devices.

What if Google promoted it with a link on the Google home page, so everybody performing a search could check it out?

Competition

A lot of people are suggesting that such a feature could never compete with Facebook and Twitter, but for the reasons mentioned above, I am not so quick to rule out the possibility. No, it’s not likely to come out and kill those two, but that’s not to say that it can’t co-exist, and gain popularity of its own, if Google makes the right moves in integrating it with its other products.

How well the product can compete is directly related to what possibilities Google explores. Even if a lot of options aren’t explored immediately, that’s not to say they won’t be slowly. Google has a way of adding a feature here, and adding a feature there to its different products. Before you know it, things are more connected than you may have realized.

It’s not necessarily all bout Gmail. According to comScore, Gmail had 176 million unique visitors in December, but how many people have actual GOOGLE accounts? You don’t have to be a Gmail user to have one, and Google is increasingly finding more ways to draw people in through various products.

Facebook is supposedly working on its own email product, which could directly compete with Gmail. Between that and Google’s upcoming announcement, the competition might be heating up between the two companies more than ever, but it still doesn’t mean they can’t co-exist. Will it even matter as more third-party apps begin supporting everything? It’s very possible that these updates will be portable among all of these different services anyway. Facebook has had no problem with posting updates to Twitter. Last year, Google actually made a big deal about its initiative to make user data as portable as possible. They formed the Data Liberation Front to "make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products."

How Could Google’s New Product Be Used for Business?

Details are still sketchy at best, but how could something like Google’s upcoming status update product work as a tool for businesses? The first thing that comes to mind is the expansion of communication with existing contacts. When you’re frequently seeing what your contacts are saying, it will not only keep those people fresh in your mind, but it can cultivate further communication.

The feature could possibly lend to better organization of your communication, which could in turn save time. Again, depending on how many of the possibilities (if any) mentioned in this article actually come to fruition, it could become a central place for that communication.

Then you have the search possibilities. As I discussed above, the feature could potentially have an impact on at least two aspects of Google’s search results pages – real-time search and social search. That’s two good-sized chunks of SERP real-estate. Not all SERPS have both or either, but it opens some additional search marketing doors. The feature would also open up more reputation management issues,  as simply an additional place to monitor, not to mention other ways businesses are currently using services like Facebook and Twitter for marketing.

We’ll See…

Stay tuned to WebProNews, as we will provide updates as we learn more about Google’s new product, which by the way should be only one of two announcements from Google’s press event today. The company has been quoted as saying they will announce innovations to two if their most popular products.

Do you see the potential for a Google status update product to be successful? Would you use it? What would it have to do to interest you? Please share your opinions.
 

Related Articles:

> Is Google Launching a Competitor for Facebook/Twitter?

> Is Google Bad at Social Media or Really, Really Good at it?

> Is Gmail Google’s Real Social Network?

As soon as this week, Google might be rolling out a “Twitter-killer” feature for Gmail users, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Gmail users can currently broadcast status messages via the Google Talk feature. The main difference between the current offering and the new feature is that status messages aren’t available in a timeline format. With the new “Twitter clone,” they will be.

Sponsor

UPDATE: While we’re still waiting for an official response from Google’s PR team, we’ve been invited to an event at the Googleplex tomorrow “to see some innovations in two of our most popular products.” The event will begin at 10 a.m. Pacific time – stay tuned tomorrow for RWW’s live coverage of the event!

This is the current option for updating statuses in Gmail:

Google’s new tools, however, will better integrate with Google’s multimedia sites, YouTube and Picasa. (Currently, Google Talk users can share YouTube videos via chat, which prompts a miniaturized version of the video to pop up above the chat in progress.) Users will also be able to see “a stream of status updates from people they choose to connect with.”

We’re contacting Google for more information and will update this post as we learn more.

In the meantime, however, we’re wondering how this feature will integrate with other status-sharing sites. Will Gmail/Google Talk’s new feature act as Google’s first steps into developing a social media client (like Tweetdeck) in its own right?

The new feature could start appearing on users’ screen as soon as this week. If you had this tool, would you use it?

Would you use a Google Twitter clone?(poll)

Discuss

Apple just received a very interesting patent for a method of sharing location data during a phone call. Assuming that Apple implements this idea in its phones, you could soon press a button during a phone call on your iPhone and request location data

from the person you are talking to. Judging from the description of this new feature in the patent, the receiver would always have to give permission before the data is sent back to you.

Sponsor

In the graphs that accompany Apple’s patent, buttons to request and release location info can be found right underneath the standard iPhone phone interface. If Apple decides to implement this, the feature would work like this:

During a call, you send out a request to get your friend’s exact location by pressing a button on the phone interface. Your friend would get an alert and gets the choice to send his location data back to you or to ignore your request. Assuming your friend wants to share his location with you, you will then get an alert with your friend’s location.

Thanks to this, you wouldn’t have to try to give long-winded and error-prone descriptions of where you are when you plan to meet up with a friend in the city, for example.

Us 20100029302

Reading through the patent, it quickly becomes clear that Apple is quite concerned with the privacy aspects of sharing location data. This makes sense, given that sharing location data has privacy implications that go far beyond just sharing what you had for lunch.

It is worth noting that MobileMe users can already check where their phones are at any given point and that all the necessary hardware to implement this feature is already available in every iPhone.

We also couldn’t help be feel reminded of Echoecho, an iPhone app for sharing location data we profiled just about a week ago. Echoecho allows users to share location data on a one-on-one basis. Unlike Apple’s patent, Echoecho’s permission-based location sharing system isn’t based solely around sharing this data in the context of a phone call, but otherwise, the two seems quite similar.

Discuss