May 2011
5 posts
“Most of our blogs, our new digital mantelpieces, are a collection of the things we find. Our collections are made public—others are given access, and we call this sharing. But it is an odd sort of sharing, where what we have found is indeed made available to others, but it is not quite a gift. A collection and a gift may both live in boxes, but they are different because the intent of each is conflicting. A collection is made for me (even if I let you look through it), while a gift is chosen for you.”
—
Frank Chimero announcing his new blog, The Mavenist.
Chimero’s writing is so fine - so spot on - that it makes me jealous every time I read something he has written.
April 2011
15 posts
Play
0:08
Mapping Your Foursquare Checkins
Most of my friends and family are well addicted to Foursquare. The service does a great job of socially engineering users to want to come back to it again and again. This is part reward, part competition, and part showing off. Facebook is also a master of this “gotta come back” inducement and both companies owe a lot of their success to getting this right.
Recently I found out that you can easily map all your Foursquare checkins with Google Maps without the use of any other app or the Foursquare API. This isn’t really advertised anywhere, but it’s a neat trick.
Login to your Foursquare account on the web and go to http://foursquare.com/feeds
On this page you will find three links to the different feeds of your checkins. The one you want here is the KML feed. For the curious KML is the Keyhole Markup Language, so named after the KH-11 spy satellites and the for the company that Google bought to integrate KML into Google Earth.
Copy the KML link URL to your clipboard and open http://maps.google.com in the browser. It turns out you can enter links to KML files in the Google Maps search box. Go ahead and paste your KML link in the Maps search box and voila, your checkins are mapped.
Lately finding just the right iPhone or iPad home screen layout is my time waster of choice (and I’m not the only one.
I tweeted that I was wasting a lot of time fooling with my home screen layout when @_hristine replied with these awesomely impractical layouts:
Says Christine, “Mine is all blue icons, and says “fang” across the top”.
And, “I have another screen with just circle icons”.
