Discontinued

From now on I will be focusing on my new blog: www.miculescu.com. Feel free to drop by!

Buzz Off?

 

I got Google Buzz today, but I must confess I wasn't quite as excited about it as I was with Wave - mostly because the latter has only pretty much disappointed me so far (e.g. I don't think anyone has logged back in since toying around with it for the first time).

What I do like about it, though:

• if anyone is ever going to be able to pull together all that mess we call the social web, it's going to be Google
• it's built into Gmail (which has hundreds of millions of users already), so its adoption rate should be quite historic - that and the fact that there's none of that "invitation" nonsense, it's just rolling out to everyone
• it's more convenient to follow shared items from Google Reader directly from within Gmail
• I like the mobile-oriented approach

And what I really don't like:

• that mobile-oriented approach has to suffer from the dreaded "everything should be browser-based" motto - I do not want a web app and I will not use it - now that Google has Android, it could seriously create one of those brilliant native apps (take Gmail or Maps for example) and would be even more decades ahead of the iPhone OS 
• (updated) I can't use the web app anyway, apparently it only works on Android 2.0+ phones
• it's still in uber-beta mode - for example, for some reason it's posting photos from my Flickr from one year ago and marking them as very recent

Despite all of the negative feedback it's gotten, though (hence the post title), I'm going to give it a shot...

foursquare in Romania

I didn't think much of foursquare until I picked it up while in New York and found out it can actually be useful to some extent - it just might be that perfect exponent of the location-based trend we all keep hearing about. I guess the tips are the best part about it (and the special offers from businesses, of course, if you're among the lucky ones who have actually managed to get them).

However, the truly interesting part is to see it being picked up in Romania. Over the past few years, I've seen Twitter grow to about 20.000 members (at least that's what they're saying) and Facebook to about 500.000 (idem) - so I'm looking forward to see how this smartphone-only service will play out.

Only a handful of people use it right now, so Bucharest is still in that annoying "not-another-venue-I-have-to-recreate-in-order-to-check-in-at" phase - but it may just have potential. I'm quite curious to see which local business will be the first to set up those special offers...

By the way, it's disappointing to already see cheaters (sad little people who just hit "Check in" on just about every venue in their area without actually being there).

So what's the web's next big thing?

(pic via)

How To Outsource Romania's Maps

At the beginning of this summer, I wrote a rant about Romania not being properly indexed on Google Maps. A friend noticed it on Facebook, and asked me if I could help start something about this using the Causes application.

A few months flew by, and the cause "Google! Put Romania On Your Maps!" has 10,208 members as of the time of this post. The cause has sparked others (including a petition on Twitter, to which Google responded), and has been mentioned in the Romanian press and even on the Google Lat Long Blog.

And from that very post on Google's blog comes the company's sheer brilliance: they have an application called Google Map Maker, which allows users to create and/or edit user-generated maps of any given area, based on their own local knowledge. And they just opened it up for Romania.

Now, I didn't exactly know how this works (and most importantly how this crowd-sourced content actually makes it to Google Maps itself), and it just so happened that Jen, a Maps Community Organizer at Google, left some helpful comments right on this blog (you can never, ever say that Google isn't on top of its game when it comes to communication).

Here's how the whole thing goes:

1. Visit Google Map Maker and search for, let's say, Bucharest
2. Add or edit (more about this and a walkthrough in their Help section). As you create or moderate, others will pitch in with feedback (which you'll be notified about via e-mail).
   
3. How does your stuff get to Google Maps (and its API)? There are processes called data transfers, which are done at a certain period of time - the last one was on May 24th - more here - Romania should be on the list next time.

Now comes the interesting part - seeing how many of those >10,000 people actually respond to this call-to-action. It's utterly needless to say that if everyone adds or edits at least 10 items, the first data transfer should cover quite a lot... So map away! [pic via]